Yep, people like to decide where they think the bar should be set, and anything less and its "unplayable". LOL PlayStation gamers tout the superior performance of the PS4, but will instantly dismiss the superior PC. If your a console gamer, and graphics are your number one priority, your gaming on the wrong platform. PC is the only device that can play these games with absolutely no compromises. Yes, your PC will be expensive, but its the only device that can play the prettiest version of a game. The truth is gaming hardware has gotten very good over the years. Developers are less hamstrung by the hardware limitations than ever before. A game on Switch has to make more compromises than the same game for PS4, and the PS4 build has to make more compromises than a PC rocking an I7 with a GTX1080 Titan. The accusation that compromises made for Switch ports is out of the question, but the advancements the PC offers are irrelevant.
Nintendo Switch Technical discussion [SOC = Tegra X1]
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Yep, people like to decide where they think the bar should be set, and anything less and its "unplayable". LOL PlayStation gamers tout the superior performance of the PS4, but will instantly dismiss the superior PC. If your a console gamer, and graphics are your number one priority, your gaming on the wrong platform. PC is the only device that can play these games with absolutely no compromises. Yes, your PC will be expensive, but its the only device that can play the prettiest version of a game. The truth is gaming hardware has gotten very good over the years. Developers are less hamstrung by the hardware limitations than ever before. A game on Switch has to make more compromises than the same game for PS4, and the PS4 build has to make more compromises than a PC rocking an I7 with a GTX1080 Titan. The accusation that compromises made for Switch ports is out of the question, but the advancements the PC offers are irrelevant.
Yeah. I had a PS4 for a few months to try some exclusives like Until Dawn, Killzone 4, Order 1886, TLOU Rehashed, etc. Until Dawn often has rather awful frame rate. I guess the PS4 hardware is a complete failure.
My point is it's not the hardware, it's what the developer does with it. If they feel some extra silly effect is worthy of giving you 15 fps pain.
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CaffeinatedChris
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I'm certainly not trying to argue that other games don't have compromises, that's the point the original poster I quoted seemed to be implying with "try to tell me it's compromised (you can't)" but rather than what consists a "compromised game" is subjective.
Maybe you don't think that the list I pointed out consists a "compromise" but others do. Hell, some people play CS:GO in 800x600 4:3 low detail in order not to "compromise" their framerate.
If it's from a previous thread, why are you replying here?
The old thread was the pre-launch "speculation" and the technical question still seems relevant, because it's asking in the present tense.
phoenix_chipset
Regular
The switch has to share that with the cpu, and the 1080 and even the Ti are bandwidth limited. At least in 4k.
Yeah I too know people who do that.
The point is the developers make decisions on what is acceptable. More effects or more frame rate. Or whether they should throw more money at the project to smooth out the performance. Or just ship it as is and rake in the money anyway.
Whatever. It's their prerogative.1080 = Pascal, Switch = Maxwell
I think Nvidia claims something like 20% better bandwidth from compression from Pascal to Maxwell
look at lower end Maxwell cards like the GTX 950, 1.5TFLOPS with 105GB/s and still considered to be bandwidth limited in many occasions.
25GB/s in docked mode sounds terrible for a machine attempting current games at 1080P...
and if this has a regular console life cycle, it's going to look really bad, even for a mobile device soon.
Don't forget that unlike those PC cards, Switch is UMA and so the the CPU will be taking quite a chunk.
The CPU cores alone can saturate the memory bus, though obviously usage like that wouldn't take place in game. Also, I believe that CPU access patterns don't always play nice with more latency tolerant GPU access, which can be an issue particularly if CPU memory access is prioritised.
IIRC, Sony had some developer slides for PS4 that showed the CPU taking anything up to 40 GB/s away from the GPU. UMA has a lot of pros, but there are some drawbacks too, particularly on a narrow bus.
Perhaps the increased capability of the TX2's CPU(s) was a factor in moving to a 128-bit bus.
Perhaps that's balanced by MSAA eating away at the rop cache and meaning you need significantly more tiles ...?
Speaking of tiles ... I still miss the Dreamcast. On chip blending and SSAA at much less than 2X cost (only one game used it).
I don't think normal system cycles will even be a thing anymore, especially for Switch. Look for a new version to hit the market every two years. It's one of the reasons I think it's so modular.
Wouldn't extreme CPU bandwidth usage insinuate terrible code? With PC's, the CPU has to work with the system ram, which typically has pretty low bandwidth compared to the onboard memory on the GPU. It just seems like a nightmare scenario in order to have the A57 cores eating up their theoretical maximum bandwidth consumption. Correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn't this mean the code is missing the cache constantly? If the majority of CPU data is held in the on chip high bandwidth cache, that should eliminate the majority of bandwidth requirements to the main memory.
I already did all that maths.
Compare Switch to the consoles. Just because the PC cards have less relative bandwidth, doesn't mean they have the optimal amount or wouldn't benefit from more. Less powerful cards have more BW/flop because they can.
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Deleted member 13524
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1 - Your pascal desktop cards don't have to share memory bandwidth with CPU cores. Some trusty source here wrote here that a Cortex A57 can consume as much as 5GB/s, but let's assume it's only ~3GB/s because of their 1GHz clocks, so we're left with 21.3-12 = 9.3 GB/s for the GPU. Let's just assume there's 10GB/s for the GPU then.
2 - ALU throughput is neither the sole nor even the largest consumer of memory bandwidth in a GPU. That would be pixel fillrate (ROP). The GTX 1080 has a 111 GPixel/s pixel fillrate for 320GB/s. Bandwidth per pixel fillrate is about 2.9. The handheld Tegra X1 has 16 ROPs at 300MHz, so 4.8 GPixel/s with 10GB/s.
That's a bandwidth-per-fillrate ratio of 2.08, or about 30% bellow the GTX1080's 2.9.
3 - Putting the switch into docked mode just makes everything even worse for the Switch.
4 - You didn't even choose a very happy comparison with the GTX 1080, since the card may very well be bandwidth-limited because nvidia is launching special editions with 10% higher memory bandwidth while not touching the core clocks.
5 - Further proof that TX1 is bandwidth-limited is how the iGPU in Tegra X2 simply got moderate clock increases while memory bandwidth increased 2.3x.
I question their methodology. Since you cannot save game data to the game cartridge, but all tests are made in game, it's unclear what their cartridge test actually is limited by since it has to read from at least two different storage areas. (And possibly have to check for and apply downloaded patches).Making this the Switch post-release tech thread. Load times are in
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...rosd-cards-for-switch-loading-time-comparison
Flash cards are far from instantaneous.
Further, they make questionable claims for the sd cards based on nothing but what is printed on the card itself. Actual tests of the performance of such cards show drastic deviations from marketing numbers. They should have hooked up a good USB-3 reader to a PC and checked read speeds to have an idea of what to expect from them.
What IS notable is that the time to perform these in game operations show only minimal differences.
It would be interesting to see launch time experiments with new games as a possible further test of performance, but I'd rather just see developer docs for read speeds.
Oh come on.
This doesn't make any sense. it's just not about best graphics, it's also about the price, games, and of course the ease of using a console. if you want a home console that can produce good graphics at a really good price, you get a ps4, it's 235 on ebay right now with uncharted 4. how much do i need to spend to get a powerful pc that can run all ps4 games at 1080p/60fps way more then 235$ thats for sure, naturally people will compare switch to ps4 because of nintendo marketing as a home console. keep in mind that ps4 has a install base of 55 million now and came out more then 3 years ago, so developers are willing to put in hard work on that version, whats there incentive for switch? as a home console it has extremely weak hardware that's gonna have a hard time doing ps4 ports justice, and reality is most developers won't bother, we have many 360/ps3 ports that already struggle on it.
NEVER!
Eh... When you compare Pascal vs Maxwell shouldn't you take this into account?
Not to mention that mem b/w in the 1080 and 1080ti are not shared with a CPU.
There is nothing wrong with being a value minded consumer, and I think the PS4 and X1 offer tremendous value for those looking for a good gaming system to play games on their TV. If your going to use graphics as your primary argument criticizing the Switch, and do not game on a PC, its hypocritical, because PC offers superior graphics to the PS4/X1. We simply do not know what the western third party support will look like, and should wait till this fall to see what if any major AAA games are being ported. As for 360/PS3 ports struggling? What ports are you referring to?
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Deleted member 13524
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Where is this coming from?
I'm a "Playstation Gamer" but I certainly don't dismiss my PC with two R9 290X cards, 10-core Ivybridge Xeon and 64GB quad-channel RAM, in a curved 3440*1440 screen.
And yet I do recognize the best-looking game I've ever seen is Uncharted 4 running in my 4K HDR TV through a PS4 Pro.