Nintendo Switch Technical discussion [SOC = Tegra X1]
- Thread starter Alucardx23
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It's less clear from the orginal source : http://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/...at-30fps-multiplayer-download-is-9-gb-w504975
"There is no difference in how graphics are rendered between docked and handheld modes, although the game may appear different simply because it is played on a larger screen, according to Bethesda. When it is docked, the game plays on your television at 720p."
Like @BRiT said, there is no secret sauce with Switch. All modern consoles use standardized hardware components. Unlike the old days with the PS2 emotion engine or the Gamecube and its TEV unit. Hardware back in those days were very unique, and each machine had significantly different strengths and weaknesses. That is not the case with any modern hardware. Switch is slightly more modern than PS4/X1 seeing as how it is a DX12 level chip, and does have the ability to utilize FP16. Sebbbi has said in the past upwards of 60% of his shaders were able to run in FP16. So as far as Switch floating point performance goes, it is well above its FP32 spec, but as you can see from the quote above, it is not reasonable to assume that the chip sees a 2X increase in capabilities thanks to FP16.
60% is a good ballpark figure, but it is important to notice that only some of these shaders are ALU bound. Shaders that are not ALU bound (or badly occupancy bound) do not gain anything from FP16 optimizations. For example FP16 precision is good enough for almost all post process shaders. However most post process shaders (such as blur kernels) are texturing or bandwidth bound. 2x ALU rate doesn't help these shaders. You might end up saving some power if you optimize for FP16, but the texturing/bandwidth bottleneck still remains.
The ALU rate of modern desktop GPUs is already very high. Bottleneck is usually somewhere else. Thus FP16 helps only in limited scenarios. Same would be true for double rate FP32 math. Older GPUs (such as PS3) and mobile GPUs are different, because they are practically designed around FP16 execution. You could say that FP32 is half rate on these GPUs (versus other bottlenecks). It is all about balance. Double rate FP16 is a good tool to have when you need it, but I greatly dislike marketing departments trying to sell it as doubling the total GPU performance. It doubles one part of the GPU, and that doubling only matters when that part is the bottleneck.
Someone just found a way to port GGX lighting formula (the most popular lighting formula nowadays) to FP16:
https://gist.github.com/romainguy/a2e9208f14cae37c579448be99f78f25
FP16 precision is definitely enough for lots of purposes, as long as you carefully go through your math. Great tool for optimizing ALU and register bound shaders. Not that useful for other purposes.
Mario looks great. With two months to go they nearly have a lock on 60fps and 900p docked. I wonder if 1080p with dynamic resolution is possible at release? It is always interesting seeing what DF finds within their investigation. Nobody playing the game will ever notice those lower resolution shadows or draw distance changes from portable to docked, but they were able to sniff them out.
L.A. Noire to run 720p undocked, 1080p docked:
http://www.perfectly-nintendo.com/l-noire-headed-nintendo-switch-november/
http://www.perfectly-nintendo.com/l-noire-headed-nintendo-switch-november/
Well, it's a last gen game. And the switch is a little bit more capable than xb360 and ps3 even in undocked mode, so no surprise here.
Mario on the other hand, is it me or are there many just colored polygons (without texture) in that game?
aside from the lowpoly food world, everything seems to be textured, normalmapped and the whole shabang
My thoughts exactly. I might splurge if the results improved my Wii game collection enough.
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betternatethanlever
Newcomer
After being impressed by ports like Doom and NBA 2K18, I'm curious. How plausible is it for Switch to run current gen 30fps AAA games in a playable, presentable state?
Many of us here have debated this tirelessly. I believe we all agree that 1080p 60fps games on PS4/X1 are the most accessible thanks to a tremendous reduction in resource requirements with the drop to 720p 30fps. I am in the camp that with enough tweaking, any current gen game could be ported to Switch. If the game is CPU bound at 30fps, then porting to three A57 cores will require some serious reworking, but if there is a will there is a way. It all comes down to incentive for the publisher. How does the return on investment look? If third party games are selling pretty well, then publishers will likely be more willing to dedicate teams to porting games to Switch. If sales are pretty ho hum, then I would think that only the low hanging fruit will be chased. 1080p 60fps ports to 720p 30fps are the low hanging fruit for publishers
betternatethanlever
Newcomer
I think those are gross oversimplifications and don't really answer my question, quite frankly. You could argue that any game could run at any system ever released. Developers could change entire rendering pipelines and/or use completely different engines (or move to 2D, if need be), and this has been done before. We've seen multiplatform games get ported to PS2/PSP/Wii/mobile etc. that barely resembled the original game, they only shared the name and not much else.
I was curious if it was technically possible for Switch to run the same game, on the same engine in a playable, presentable state. Not if it was financially feasible or if developers would do it. It's interesting because the 60fps games that had to have their framerates halved still saw a significant reduction in image quality. Assuming Switch is only slightly worse than XB1/PS4 on the CPU side, and the major bottleneck seems to be on the GPU front, just how much visual fidelity they would have to compromise to get them running. For example, could Doom on the Switch at 60fps would've been possible?
I was curious if it was technically possible for Switch to run the same game, on the same engine in a playable, presentable state. Not if it was financially feasible or if developers would do it. It's interesting because the 60fps games that had to have their framerates halved still saw a significant reduction in image quality. Assuming Switch is only slightly worse than XB1/PS4 on the CPU side, and the major bottleneck seems to be on the GPU front, just how much visual fidelity they would have to compromise to get them running. For example, could Doom on the Switch at 60fps would've been possible?
phoenix_chipset
Regular
You got the best answers you could get. No one here can possibly know with certainty if a game could run this way or that way on switch, or what the bottleneck on switch would be ; we're not the developers.
My take is, the switch is compatible with any graphical features or cpu tasks that ps4 and xbox one are capable of doing. It simply comes down to processing resources. I don't think all engines will work on switch though since they might require more than 3 cores. Square enix can't seem to get their FFXV engine running properly for example, and they're looking to port the game using UE4. Basically I would say some engines aren't going to run on switch, but I don't think the switch is incapable of running any game logic (and I mean the same game), albeit with serious compromises.
What cuts devs can do on the cpu side, even if it's 30fps on Ps4 - cut down level of detail (geometry pop in), amount of characters on screen, A.I. routines etc. With dooms closed off sections I think the possible cpu processing cuts were fewer than an open world game would have for example. Therefore 60fps might not have been possible.
Porting from Ps4 to switch is a far simpler task than porting from ps3 to Wii ; I don't think fundamentally different games would ever need to be made. But perhaps that would still be better than hacking away at the original game until it runs on switch. I would certainly prefer brand new games than inferior ports, but I can still appreciate good ports to switch.