Nintendo Switch Technical discussion [SOC = Tegra X1]

[Goodtwin]

Personally I fail to see this as anything other than par for the course here. It's a 6 year old last gen game and it hasn't aged all that well in my opinion. The difference between Switch and the X360 version is not large. It's great that Switch is getting 3rd party support and if you haven't played this, it's a fantastic game, but Bethesda milking this old horse with all these different full price versions is literally getting old in 2017. I hope to see a sequel for this one of these days. It'll be another challenge to squeeze that into the Switch.

Frame rate is very much improved, and resolution docked is 900p. Was Skyrim on 360 and PS3 even native 720p?

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[AlNom]

Was Skyrim on 360 and PS3 even native 720p?

Yep.

 

[swaaye]

Still, this is Skyrim SE so that's a nice little extra bonus. I guess.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Still, this is Skyrim SE so that's a nice little extra bonus. I guess.

SE brought two things: a graphics overhaul and a more stable engine. Arguably the latter is way more important and that's what Switch got. As much as I love gaming on my Switch, I just couldn't imagine playing Skyrim on it in handheld mode. Not unless they've utterly redone the interface, which it doesn't look like they have.

 

[bunnybug]

Personally I fail to see this as anything other than par for the course here. It's a 6 year old last gen game and it hasn't aged all that well in my opinion. The difference between Switch and the X360 version is not large. It's great that Switch is getting 3rd party support and if you haven't played this, it's a fantastic game, but Bethesda milking this old horse with all these different full price versions is literally getting old in 2017. I hope to see a sequel for this one of these days. It'll be another challenge to squeeze that into the Switch.

Yea it looks closer to he 360 version then ps4 in the DF video.

 

[swaaye]

SE brought two things: a graphics overhaul and a more stable engine. Arguably the latter is way more important and that's what Switch got. As much as I love gaming on my Switch, I just couldn't imagine playing Skyrim on it in handheld mode. Not unless they've utterly redone the interface, which it doesn't look like they have.

I haven't played much of SE, but I don't remember the original as being unstable. They did patch it a million times though because of the usual pile of gameplay quirks. And Bethesda finally learned all about compilation options when an enterprising individual discovered Skyrim was artificially limited to x87.

 

[Cyan]

Mario Odyssey is fantastic all around. Nintendo has prioritized 60fps for their Mario games for a long time now, and Odyssey maintains that tradition. It looks great, it plays great, and technically speaking it holds up very well.

Now Skyrim on Switch:

It is the remastered version, docked is 900p, and the framerate is nearly rock solid 30fps. The game is charting rather well on Amazon leading up to release, and on the eshop it is already at #5. It is good to see Bethesda's efforts being rewarding with people buying these exceptional efforts.

Skyrim on a portable, that's a dream come true.

 

[bunnybug]

Digital foundry video LA noire switch vs ps3. doesn't bode well for GTAV o switch.

 

[BRiT]

That was posted in the DigitalFoundry Thread but it got no traction because it's Nintendo and there's plenty of other videos/articles around the same time about the One X.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Looks like a bad port.

Something as simple as the game simulation being tied directly to the framerate is just...bad.

On PS3 when frames drop the simulation keeps going. On Switch when frames drop, the simulation also drops. Bad lazy port is the feeling I get from it.

Regards,
SB

 

[BRiT]

Maybe its some limit of the SDK/Platform or some other oddity?

 

[Allandor]

Looks like a bad port.

Something as simple as the game simulation being tied directly to the framerate is just...bad.

On PS3 when frames drop the simulation keeps going. On Switch when frames drop, the simulation also drops. Bad lazy port is the feeling I get from it.

Regards,
SB

Don't forget the switch has just 3 1GHz cpu cores for games. LA noire used almost everything the ps3 and xb360 offered with their CPUs. So you can easily get into a cpu-bottleneck with the switch cpu.

 

[milk]

Don't forget the switch has just 3 1GHz cpu cores for games. LA noire used almost everything the ps3 and xb360 offered with their CPUs. So you can easily get into a cpu-bottleneck with the switch cpu.

Still no reason to not have the simulation's time-stepping be variable. That's just elegant code.

 

[function]

Still no reason to not have the simulation's time-stepping be variable. That's just elegant code.

Ideally yeah, but there's a minimum period between simulation updates that you need before things break down. With Switches slow CPU (compared to PS360, but fast compared to other mobile devices) it may be that without significant reworking there were just points where they had to maintain the simulation intervals but lose real time performance.

The original studio is now defunct, and reworking the code may not have been practical even if it was technically possible.

 

[milk]

LA noire is not the kind of game where you'd expect to need so much precision that timestepping up to 20fps instead of 30 would break the simulation. And I imagine the original already worked like that because simply, what fucking AAA game does not work like that for god sakes. But given how shaky its development was, everythung is possible I guess. If that was the case then, it is not the fault of the porting team then... It'd be unrealistic to expect them to refactor the engine to that extent.

 

[Goodtwin]

I think we need some perspective before we read too much in LA Noir.

LA Noire was built on a custom engine designed with PlayStation 3's Cell processor in mind, and this version was the preferred console edition back in the day. It was quite a sight: PS3 managed to run a massive open-world built around an impressive facsimile of Los Angeles, with fully functioning day-night cycles, weather, physics, wandering NPCs and traffic systems. All this meant a heavy reliance on the machine's unique synergistic processing units -

Uncharted Remastered

For PS4's x86 Jaguar cores, Naughty Dog re-architected the way in which code is executed with the introduction of "fibres". Rather than running gameplay code on the main PPU core and hiving out other engine tasks to the SPUs, all processing jobs are run on these fibres - akin to hundreds of threads all assigned to single cores on the PS4 CPU, running massively in parallel. The first problem was plumbing in the new PS4 rendering code Naughty Dog had written - it didn't use the fibre system, resulting in the disappointing initial frame-rate of the initial TLOU port.

The Last of Us Remastered

"I wish we had a button that was like ‘Turn On PS4 Mode’, but no,” Druckmann told Edge. “We expected it to be Hell, and it was Hell. Just getting an image onscreen, even an inferior one with the shadows broken, lighting broken and with it crashing every 30 seconds… It was optimized on a binary level, but after shifting those things over [to PS4] you have to go back to the high level, make sure the [game] systems are intact, and optimize it again."

These are both ports of games that targeted the PS3, and thus leveraged the Cell processors capabilities. Naughty Dog is one of the most technically proficient developers in the world, and they had struggles porting their games to the much more powerful PS4. The developer tasked with porting LA Noire to Switch was not the original developer, and certainly not on the same level as the crew at Naughty Dog.

If Rockstar Games wants to port GTA V to Switch, I am certain that a budget port of LA Noires results wont deter them. I wont say the LA Noire port is poor, most reviewers have been positive on it, but the technical shortcomings could most certainly be resolved with the more talented in house group at Rockstar.

 

[milk]

Only LA noire was already on xb360. That is a much more straightfoward port.

 

[Goodtwin]

Only LA noire was already on xb360. That is a much more straightfoward port.

And who handled the 360 version? Point is, the port of LA Noire to Switch was not done in house by the original development team. If Rockstar wants to port GTA V to Switch, they will make it happen.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Wasn't LA Noire on PC a bugfest as well? I remember I wanted to buy that game but after reading some of the Steam comments I decided against it.

 

[Recop]

These are both ports of games that targeted the PS3, and thus leveraged the Cell processors capabilities. Naughty Dog is one of the most technically proficient developers in the world, and they had struggles porting their games to the much more powerful PS4. The developer tasked with porting LA Noire to Switch was not the original developer, and certainly not on the same level as the crew at Naughty Dog.

The Last of Us runs at 60fps on PS4. LA Noire runs without any problem on PS4.