Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2016 - 2017]

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Emulating Switch should be helluva lot easier. Heck, any Maxwell+ nVidia GPU should be extremely compatible straight away, and hackers can work with Tegra emulation as a basis. I imagine there's even a Tegra virtual machine for developers already!

Impressive in terms of how quickly they got a working Switch emulator out (bugs and performance notwithstanding). Not in terms of absolute difficulty. :)

Regards,
SB
 
What Switch emulator? The LoZBotW on PC is running on a Wii U emulator.

I had said that I mistook the emulation as being the Switch version which would have been impressive even with the documentation available for the SOC.

You had replied that emulating the Switch would be easier than emulating the Wii-U.

And then I clarified that I meant impressive as in how quickly they could have gotten a Switch emulator out (had it been running on a Switch emulator). IE - impressive getting a Switch emulator out in a matter of days. Not impressive in difficulty compared to emulating a Wii-U.

Regards,
SB
 
Dragon Quest Heroes just seems like a bad port all around to be honest. I'm more interested in how Yuka-Laylee, Snake Pass, and other games using more modern engines compare.
 
Dragon Quest Heroes just seems like a bad port all around to be honest. I'm more interested in how Yuka-Laylee, Snake Pass, and other games using more modern engines compare.
Indeed DF mentions it runs even worse in handheld mode, which shouldn't be.

If Yooka laylee hits 1080p with solid frame rate i'll be impressed but I expect 900p.
 
Sure it's not meant to compete with PS4, but it seems devs who have ported the game have no clue how to сut the content or optimize, all their graphics cutoffs just look wrong.
Nintendo is marketing Switch as both home console and as handheld. The current home console competition is the 3 year old PS4 and Xbox One. Both are selling at 249$-299$ depending on bundle and accessories. Switch is selling at 299$. If you are looking for a home console, these are competing devices in the same price category. 11 year old last gen consoles (Xbox 360, PS3) are already long gone.

Switch is additionally a handheld device. In this field it competes against PS Vita, 3DS and existing tablets and mobile phones. We need reviews that compare Switch between all the relevant devices in both handheld and home console market. Currently it seems that Switch is doing very well against the handheld competition, but the home console side of Switch doesn't seem to be faring well against the home console competition. However, we need more cross platform comparisons to draw a final conclusion.

As you point out, this single game might not be the best comparison. Digital Foundry is certainly going to do more comparisons when more cross platforms games are released. I am personally interested to see Snake Pass comparisons as it is using Unreal Engine. Should be a good baseline comparison of "AA" indie game performance on Switch.
 
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What about the actual circumstance where the Vita is well understood device with a fantastic set of devtools and the Switch is a new device with an unknown toolchain and a new API. Hmmm.

But I thought nvidia had done a fantastic job preparing a full vertical integration of their good old Tegra X1 for developers to jump right in and do high-level programming while getting low-level optimizations. And that's why Nintendo had gone with 2-year-old TX1 because magical ocus pocus optimization and developer's dream environment provided by 500 man-years.


Or perhaps it's time to get realistic about what to expect from the Switch, which might be essentially PS360 visuals+framerates at 720p in handheld mode and PS360 visuals+framerates in docked mode at 900/1080p.




On the other hand, Switch is a lot faster than MS's latest Windows Phone...
Considering Microsoft's latest (and last) Windows Phone is the Lumia 650 with a Snapdragon 212, I say you're absolutely right.
 
Digital Foundry: Zelda patch improves frame-rate on Switch
UPDATE: Digital Foundry weighs in with new performance tests - and do Wii U users get the improvements too?

The stress test showed an average of 25fps before this patch, and 29fps after. This is very noticeable while playing. People that haven't played the game need to realize there are many areas that already ran a steady 30fps. Basically the areas without lots of foliage already ran great. This patch has offered a massive improvement in the areas that didn't run so great. DF notes that no compromises were made in order to get the performance up, strictly optimization to the game. Not sure how much more Nintendo will work on performance optimizations seeing as how the performance is now up to par. Very few games on the market maintain their target framerate 100% of the time.
 
The stress test showed an average of 25fps before this patch, and 29fps after. This is very noticeable while playing. People that haven't played the game need to realize there are many areas that already ran a steady 30fps. Basically the areas without lots of foliage already ran great. This patch has offered a massive improvement in the areas that didn't run so great. DF notes that no compromises were made in order to get the performance up, strictly optimization to the game. Not sure how much more Nintendo will work on performance optimizations seeing as how the performance is now up to par. Very few games on the market maintain their target framerate 100% of the time.

Just shows people should not judge a system by launch titles (or even ports). Would you happen to know the size of the patch? I can't find it in the article
 
Just shows people should not judge a system by launch titles (or even ports). Would you happen to know the size of the patch? I can't find it in the article

Sorry, not sure. But it downloaded extremely fast, so I cant imagine that its all that big. The Switch currently sucks for memory management, so figuring out the size of the patch isn't as easy as you would expect.
 
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