Nintendo Switch Technical discussion [SOC = Tegra X1]

What point ? I didn't see anything relevant in your answers...

I gave you a logical reasoning based on empirical data, something that you failed to do until now...

LOL. If you didn't see anything relevant in my answers, then you really have no idea of what you are talking about. It's obvious that you only see numbers and ignore the most important: how they are produced.

I didn't fall to do anything. You are the one avoiding every single point that contradicts your POV by marking them as irrelevant. If you think that Wiiu and Switch having very different architectures is irrelevant than you just show your own ignorance. Just like you show when you completely disregard the closeness of architecture between Switch and Xbox One / PS4.

I'm done with you.
 
So, you deny the fact that the Switch is close to the WiiU in terms of power when undocked ?

Indeed, otherwise you are simply defeated by basic logic.

Here's the gap between the portable mode and the docked one in WF2 : "We pixel counted a wide variety of shots from the docked mode, and came up with a whole host of results. Everything ranging from a top end of 720p to 1216x684 to 540p and 432p all the way down to 640x360. When played in portable mode, 768x432 and 640x360 are common pixel counts, but it can increase from there depending on load."

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-wolfenstein-2-switch-tech-analysis

As you can see, it is far lower than that between the XB1/Switch (docked). The only major change is the resolution while everything else is more or less similar. We are far from a resolution gap that can be as big as 406% at half the framerate...

So unless you claim that the Switch undocked is far more powerful than a WiiU (we all know that is false) then you have to admit that the Switch (docked) is closer to last gen consoles in terms of performances.
 
Might want to stop the selective quoting. How about you include the parts where it says geometry is almost the same as on other consoles and almost all the effects are still there as well?

Forget it, he does not understand that there is more to graphics than resolution and frames per second.
 
But yeah man. There's a good degree of sloppiness to the port. I saw direct feed footage and there's just no excuse for that poor an image. I swear playing N64 games on my 55 inch sammy is not as blurry :LOL: Add to that the whole game isn't even on the cart and the amount of cut corners are evident. And it still dips to the twenties?!

Again, not discrediting the port team, I can't speak to what restraints were put on them. But to use it as Switches benchmark...?
 
Again, not discrediting the port team, I can't speak to what restraints were put on them. But to use it as Switches benchmark...?

Yup this would be the same as if someone was constantly pointing out Ghostbusters on PS3 as why PS3 is a crappy architecture. Pick out the worst port you can find and then somehow make it seem like that is all that the platform is capable of and thus proof that PS3 is just really old technology that can't compete with X360.

Regards,
SB
 
So, you deny the fact that the Switch is close to the WiiU in terms of power when undocked ?

Indeed, otherwise you are simply defeated by basic logic.

Here's the gap between the portable mode and the docked one in WF2 : "We pixel counted a wide variety of shots from the docked mode, and came up with a whole host of results. Everything ranging from a top end of 720p to 1216x684 to 540p and 432p all the way down to 640x360. When played in portable mode, 768x432 and 640x360 are common pixel counts, but it can increase from there depending on load."

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-wolfenstein-2-switch-tech-analysis

As you can see, it is far lower than that between the XB1/Switch (docked). The only major change is the resolution while everything else is more or less similar. We are far from a resolution gap that can be as big as 406% at half the framerate...

So unless you claim that the Switch undocked is far more powerful than a WiiU (we all know that is false) then you have to admit that the Switch (docked) is closer to last gen consoles in terms of performances.

Yes, I deny that fact. You are basing your assessment on incomplete information. You are assuming that a WiiU would be capable of running Wolfenstein 2. It would not.

Look at the minimum requirements for PC. On the AMD side it calls for an R9 290. You might run it on a lower tier card, but not on anything pre-GCN architecture like an HD 6970. Why? Because the freaking engine does not support it!

Now, guess what the WiiU GPU was a derivative of: pre-GCN!

Switch has a modern GPU architecture that allows games built for PS4 and Xbox One to be easily ported over, irrespective of the raw power. To force the same games to run on a WiiU, you would have to butcher them even more, work on workarounds to keep the same effects which would potentially cost more performance or greatly change the engine!

Now, what do you think is harder to do:
1) change some settings on the engine like resolution, texture filtering, shadow quality, etc.
2) change the engine itself to fit the hardware

The answer is obviously 2! If doing number 1 to the Switch is viable, as it seems to be, with the exception of Frostbite (while Unreal 4, Snowdrop, IDTech 6 work fine), then the Switch is automatically closer to the PS4 / XBOX, irrespective of the sacrifices made to image quality!

You really struggle to see power as more than frames per second or resolution. In that case you are discussing in wrong place, as it was pointed out to you before, again and again.
 
@Picao84 Even the gtx 480 and 5870 (both DX11) will boot any current game assuming there isn't a Vram limitation. Wii U is an DX10 variant, possibly with some features from cypress? Anyways, it's not DX11 so yeah no Doom or anything else current without major changes. Dice and 4A would rather troll Ninty on twitter than develop for Wii U and now switch :yep2:

There's vids of Doom running on 6970 albeit seemingly not well
 
Yup this would be the same as if someone was constantly pointing out Ghostbusters on PS3 as why PS3 is a crappy architecture. Pick out the worst port you can find and then somehow make it seem like that is all that the platform is capable of and thus proof that PS3 is just really old technology that can't compete with X360.

It's not only WF2... it's also Doom and many less impressive games such as Fortnite, Dragon Quest, Sonic, etc.

Each time, developers had to make severe compromises on the Switch version.

Look at the minimum requirements for PC. On the AMD side it calls for an R9 290. You might run it on a lower tier card, but not on anything pre-GCN architecture like an HD 6970. Why? Because the freaking engine does not support it!

If i'm not mistaken, it was also the case for the Unreal Engine 3 on Switch. Yet Outlast runs fine on this console.

Now, what do you think is harder to do:
1) change some settings on the engine like resolution, texture filtering, shadow quality, etc.
2) change the engine itself to fit the hardware

As i already said to milk, i don't dispute this point. Indeed, it may require more work on last gen consoles due to compatibility issues but at the end the performance gap would be closer to last gen consoles.

You have to consider the raw performance gap. Otherwise, just because a GPU is as modern as the PS4 one, then i could say a game built for a 50Tflops GPU would be an easy port on PS4. The anwser is obviously no...

Fact is everything that can be done on an undocked Switch can be done on a WiiU with minimal comprises. At least, it's the most reasonable conclusion that we can make based on empirical data.
 
As i already said to milk, i don't dispute this point. Indeed, it may require more work on last gen consoles due to compatibility issues but at the end the performance gap would be closer to last gen consoles.

But you are disputing it! You are only considering that it would be more work, ignoring that it would also most likely make the it pointless. Older GPU architectures are inherently less eficient. They take more hardware resources to achieve the same effects, if at all. In other words, imagining that WiiU and the Switch have exactly the same raw power, the Switch would still give better results. Don't quote Zelda again because, like I said before, it is a port from the WiiU, so it most likely is not using all the rendering technics that benefit the Switch.

You have to consider the raw performance gap. Otherwise, just because a GPU is as modern as the PS4 one, then i could say a game built for a 50Tflops GPU would be an easy port on PS4. The anwser is obviously no...

Hardware does not work like that. Whenever we achieve a 50TF GPU, it will have a lot of architecture differences to the PS4 that it is not even funny to make that comparison. Performance is a result from architecture, not a magical switch or button. Even die shrinks only allow you to go so far. Look at Intel's Netburst architecture, built to get more raw power by pushing the clock speed. It failed spectacularly.

All your case shows is that you have absolutely no idea at all about how hardware works.

Fact is everything that can be done on an undocked Switch can be done on a WiiU with minimal comprises. At least, it's the most reasonable conclusion that we can make based on empirical data.

What empyrical data??? Show me a game that was back ported from a PS4 / Xbox One to the Wiiu??
 
@Picao84 Even the gtx 480 and 5870 (both DX11) will boot any current game assuming there isn't a Vram limitation. Wii U is an DX10 variant, possibly with some features from cypress? Anyways, it's not DX11 so yeah no Doom or anything else current without major changes. Dice and 4A would rather troll Ninty on twitter than develop for Wii U and now switch :yep2:

There's vids of Doom running on 6970 albeit seemingly not well

Wolfenstein does not run on DX11, hence why Kepler is the minimum required GPU on nvidia side (despite promises Fermi did not get proper DX12 support).

But in any case @Recoup, more proof that 1) switch is closer to PS4 / Xbox One performance levels
2) raw power, as you define it, means jack

Doom does not run well at all on a HD 6970, a GPU that boasted 2.7 TFlops of raw power!! The nvidia competitor at the time was the Gtx580, a GPU with 1.6TFlops of computing power, more than one TFlop of different, yet the Gtx 580 was around 30% faster, despite the TFlop deficit!

The OG PS4 has 1.8 TFlops, almost a full TFlop of difference!!! According to your logic, the PS4 is inferior to HD 6970 and should not be able to run Doom better!! But it does it, way way better!

The Switch undocked has around 158 GFlops of raw power, a mere 5.8% of the raw power of the HD6970. It has no business whatsoever running Doom AT ALL, according to your logic. Yet it does.

Here you have: empyrical evidence of how much TFlops in the WiiU GPU architecture means squat!

The WiiU GPU makes use of the same architecture present on the HD6970. That architecture had lots of theoretical raw power, but was extremely inefficient at using it. Why? Because it had a VLIW architecture which is much harder to extract performance, than the modern GCN and Kepler/Maxwell/Pascal architectures.

In other words, the WiiU GPU raw power, in the real world, was fraction of the stated TFlops.

Since you like numbers so much, let's extrapolate the real performance difference between the HD 6970 (Wiiu GPU architecture) and Gtx580 (closer to Switch GPU architecture, although older).

HD6970: 2,7 Tflops
GTX580: 1.6 Tflops

Gtx580 is around 30% faster, so to get HD6970 up to speed let's increase HD 6970 TFlops by 30%, giving us 3.5 TFlops.

Now let's divide 1,6 by 3,5. It gives 45%. So, in the real world, the HD6970 behaves like a GPU with only 45% of its raw power! Shocking... if someone is new to these things, like you are.

Now let's extrapolate to the WiiU vs Switch undocked. 45% of 352 GFlops gives 158 real world GFlops. That is around 40% of the Switch raw power docked! In other words the Switch docked is 2,43 times faster than the WiiU!

And this is even before taking into account that Switch uses Maxwell architecture, which is also more efficient than the gtx 580 architecture was!

This means that Xbox One, being closer in architecture to the PS4 and Switch, has 8 times the raw power of the WiiU (1.3 TFlops vs 158 GFlops), while it is "only" 3.38 times faster than the Switch docked.

Ergo, the Switch is closer to Xbox One than WiiU, in docked mode.

Edit - OK, got a little confused with Switch numbers. I seemed to remember that in undocked mode the Switch had 384 Gflops, but that's actually in docked mode. Unless we consider FP16, which doubles processing power in some situations, the Switch in portable mode is not that faster (circa 20%) than WiiU, although docked it is way more powerful.

Still, the point remains that WiiU would find it much harder to run PS4 / Xbox One ports than the Switch, given the absense of hardware support for the new APUs.
 
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Actually, that Wolfenstein 2 port illustrates the situation quite nicely. The Switch has an architecture and RAM space that is similar to the PS4/XB1 but with basic GPU grunt and memory bandwidth that is closer to the previous generation stationary consoles, necessitating a cut down workload when porting titles originally targeting PS4/XB1, but not necessarily by cutting down features.

Is anyone really in conflict with that analysis?
 
Only those wanting to brand Switch as 'closer to last gen than this' by totally oversimplifying things.

This is another of those debates with no clear question and a bunch of assertions with supporting 'facts' that don't really relate to the opposition assertions.
 
Don't quote Zelda again because, like I said before, it is a port from the WiiU, so it most likely is not using all the rendering technics that benefit the Switch.

It's not only Zelda, it's every possible port where the undocked mode systematically fails to outclass last gen consoles by a decent margin : MK8, Zelda, Bayonetta, La Noire, Skyrim, etc.

At best, you will obtain a better framerate but downgrades are equally possible in some areas : "Texture filtering quality, for instance, takes a significant hit, taking it below the quality levels set by the docked mode, Wii U and Xbox 360."

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...itch-bayonetta-the-definitive-console-version

"Interestingly, Switch's portable mode uses a similar technique. You get a native 1280x720 on Switch to match its screen, giving it the same resolution as a PS3. However, the game will again scale down to 75 per cent of this on the horizontal axis - to 960x720 - when it needs to. In terms of last-gen comparisons on a big open world game, the takeaway is that when docked, Switch has GPU horsepower to spare, but developers need to be creative on the handheld side of things - aspects that would likely translate to a prospective GTA port too."

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-la-noire-switch-port-tested

"Let's kick off by talking about resolution. While docked, Skyrim operates at a native 1600x900, while playing in mobile mode shows us the first sign of compromise. When we looked at the
Switch port at Gamescom, everything indicated a native 720p resolution, but the final code reveals more: a fairly basic form of resolution scaling designed to sustain smooth performance. Under load, resolution drops back suddenly to 896x720 - 70 per cent of the native pixel-count."

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-skyrim-switch-vs-playstation-4

With Slatoon 2, the Switch fails to hit constant 720p when undocked : "A similar set-up is in place when the Switch is unseated from its dock, whereupon GPU clocks drop significantly. For the most part, Splatoon 2 seems to fluctuate between two specific framebuffer sizes - 1152x648 and the native 720p of the mobile display."

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-how-does-splatoon-2-tech-improve-over-wii-u

What empyrical data??? Show me a game that was back ported from a PS4 / Xbox One to the Wiiu??

Why would anyone port a game on a dead console ? First point.

Anyway :


Wolfenstein does not run on DX11, hence why Kepler is the minimum required GPU on nvidia side (despite promises Fermi did not get proper DX12 support).

Watchdog, MG5, ROTR, none of them are DX10/9 compatible on PC, yet they run on last gen consoles. Please, stop with this nonsense...

The OG PS4 has 1.8 TFlops, almost a full TFlop of difference!!! According to your logic, the PS4 is inferior to HD 6970 and should not be able to run Doom better!! But it does it, way way better!

My logic is based on actual games, not numbers... when undocked, the Switch systematically failed to outperform last gen consoles.

Still, the point remains that WiiU would find it much harder to run PS4 / Xbox One ports than the Switch, given the absense of hardware support for the new APUs.

This is not my point... i said that the portable mode is very close in terms of performances to a WiiU.

And the gap between the portable mode/docked mode is always much smaller than that between the XB1/Switch (docked).

Once again, do you know a single game that has to run at half the framerate when undocked ?
 
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On paper & simplified:

switch is closer of last gen in raw Power, but on feature wise(+ram abount) it is closer/on par with current gen.

If one ignores either, they are wrong.

Why it is so big deal for some to admit that switch is not a power house of a console, it is just a handheld with decent specs?

Last of us, Uncharted 1-3 on ps3 are considered as some of most complex/graphically impressive games of last gen. Could switch run similar games or better looking games on same resolution/fps?

If no to res/fps but yes to graphical complexity, then it shows out the point = ~similar raw power of last gen with similar features of current gen.

I see switch as nice current gen handheld with too low raw power to be seen as current gen home console.

So it is kind of part of
both gens.

Maybe closer to modern phones/tablets than home consoles. It uses tablet chip after all.
 
Last of us, Uncharted 1-3 on ps3 are considered as some of most complex/graphically impressive games of last gen. Could switch run similar games or better looking games on same resolution/fps

It could easily run these games at a higher resolution on its docked mode.

Undocked, i don't think it could outclass a PS3/360 by a relevant margin.

Edit : here is how WF2 can look at times

DhDb-DeUcAABHQ_.jpg:large


DhDd5cqVQAAqKJq.jpg:large


I guess it's the portable mode.
 
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It's fascinating to me how this thread goes in circles. You guys have been discussing/arguing how Switch is modern hardware, how it's better than PS360, and how it can run some modern games for 52 pages. :)

I've always been interested in translations of games from AC powered boxes to little battery devices though. Since the Game Boy days. Lots of good stuff happening for Switch. Just think about how much portable gaming power you have in your hands these days.
 
It's fascinating to me how this thread goes in circles. You guys have been discussing/arguing how Switch is modern hardware, how it's better than PS360, and how it can run some modern games for 52 pages. :)

I've always been interested in translations of games from AC powered boxes to little battery devices though. Since the Game Boy days. Lots of good stuff happening for Switch. Just think about how much portable gaming power you have in your hands these days.

Well, I think most of us are on the same page.

The Switch has basically the same technical capabilities as both the PS4 and XBO just in a lower power envelope and hence lower speed.

Only one person, I think, still tries to argue that it is closer to last gen and not current gen.

Regards,
SB
 
That depends how you define current gen. For me current gen is the Xbox One X.


:p
 
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