bonzobanana said:
Memory bandwidth is a bit limited and there is pressure to keep storage resources low. In that situation there will be games that outperform Switch on PS3 and 360 in certain situations.
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The Switch has Delta Colour Compression.
Maxwell's implementation of Delta Colour Compression allowed it to achieve a 20-30% bandwidth saving over Kepler.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/8526/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-review/3
That's 3rd gen. So there was another 15-20% on top of that.
Thus bandwidth isn't a direct comparison between 7th gen consoles and the Switch based purely on the memory bus.
And thanks to Maxwells tiled-based rasterization it's able to be more efficient at culling, meaning it does less work and can use the limited bandwidth it has to a greater effect.
bonzobanana said:
I still see people today write the wii u is superior to 360 and PS3 and yet I know from experience this is untrue overall. The wii u's is a weaker console that benefits from fantastic Nintendo games.
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To be fair... The Switch's GPU like the WiiU's is more efficient. It's not as efficient as Maxwell, but it's certainly better than the R580 hybrid chip in the Xbox 360.
The Achilles heel is of course that paltry 12.8GB/s of bandwidth which the eDRAM is supposed to try and mitigate, which will vary between developers on how effectively it is leveraged.
bonzobanana said:
I'm not a Switch owner but looking to buy one at some point and curious about its performance level. It does feel many are ignoring the Switch lack of CPU resources but the games are showing this to be an issue.
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The Switch's CPU can hold it's own against the last generation consoles. It's amazing how far CPU performance has come in the last decade.
The Switch's CPU would have easily beaten the Xbox 360 and Wii U's CPU no contest if it actually ran with it's original clocks.
Better low-level API's and more efficient drivers have lightened the CPU burden somewhat though, which will play in the Switch's favor.
bonzobanana said:
It's at a lower level in pure gflops. Something like 157 gflops in portable mode or 188 gflops with a performance boost at the expense of battery life. From what I've read 157 gflops is the norm in most games not 188 gflops. That's 19 gflops less than wii u and something like 50-90 less than 360 and PS3 in portable mode.
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Gflops are irrelevant. Unless all other things are equal.
A GPU with less flops can beat a GPU with more flops.
bonzobanana said:
In the pc world we aren't seeing claims that the slightly newer architecture and features radically changes game performance. An old high end gpu of 200 gflops compared to a new low end budget one of 200 gflops doesn't magically outperform the older model even if one is DX10 and the other DX12. Sometimes the older model might actually perform better as it may have higher end spec elsewhere, more memory, higher bandwidth memory etc. It was designed with less compromises and cost reductions. On screen you might get one or two improved effects if you are lucky mostly nothing though.
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Radeon 5870:
* 2.72 Teraflops.
* 153.6GB/s of bandwidth.
Radeon 7850.
* 1.76 Teraflops.
* 153.6GB/s of bandwidth.
No contest that the Radeon 5870 would win right? I mean, flops is all that matters? And if you have the same bandwidth there isn't a radical difference in performance right? Those are YOUR claims.
And you are wrong.
https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1062?vs=1076
The Radeon 7850 wins hands down.
Fact of the matter is... Architectural efficiency is important and people need to stop ignoring it in favor of using something simple like flops or bandwidth as their only comparison points, it's stupid, it's inaccurate and it's wrong. Stop doing it.
bonzobanana said:
Like the wii u though I'm sure the Switch will have many comparisons with newer and older hardware over its lifetime and the evidence accumulating now clearly show its strength and weaknesses already.
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And so it should.
quickrick said:
It's still far to early to give judgment that switch CPU is weaker then 360/ps3 CPU, it's just came out, and runs most games better. aside from al noir which is probably the most demanding port, but that game especially targeted ps3 CPU, and 360 ran a bit so not exactly a fair comparison, we need more games to come tot his conclusion.
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Some tasks the Switch's CPU will beat the Xbox 360/Playstation 3's CPU. In other tasks it will loose.
I.E It should win with integers every day of the week as it's a more balanced architecture, but loose in iterative refinement floating point which the Cell will dominate.
It's a very different ISA anyway.
The main issue with the Switch CPU is that it is being held back by it's clock rate, if it was running 80% faster it would have won, no contest.
For now though... Ports are our best gauges to the CPU capabilities of the device.
