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Digital Foundry: Nintendo Switch CPU and GPU clock speeds revealed

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Urthor

Member
They expect to make actual money with this piece of shit?

Sega. Dreamcast. Literally all there is to it. It will sell better than the Wii U as a premium 3DS for the hardcore portable fans, but it's way too expensive for the traditional kiddie mobile market, which Nintendo are waving the white flag in, right decision but brave of them, but I cannot see it making inroads into a saturated full on console market without multiple Ocarina of Time level titles in a short space of time. And Nintendo can't do that.


Third party will be here though. Plenty of shovel knight/rocket league tier experiences can use this, they'll port over indie titles hand over fist, just lol @AAA
 

Rodin

Member
Wait the iPhone 7 is 730 gflops ffs. That would mean the thing is equivalent to 80% of an IPhone 7 gpu while docked. Wow. Nintendo is seriously cheaping out on the HW. I mean the damn thing is basically an underclocked Nvidia Shield for crying out loud. What a shame.

Not surprised to see why Zelda has been running in the 20-something fps area.

Yeah let's stop with the bullshit now. Zelda was the Wii U version badly encoded (NS version was only shown at Fallon's and it was rock solid 30fps even during the explosion) and the iPhone is nowhere near 700 gflops.

If it was more powerful than the battery life will be bad and people complain.

If the battery life is long but the specs are lower than the Shield TV than people will complain.

Nintendo can never win.

We don't know if the battery life is going to be even decent.
 
If it was more powerful than the battery life will be bad and people complain.

If the battery life is long but the specs are lower than the Shield TV than people will complain.

Nintendo can never win.
 

kraspkibble

Permabanned.
Anyway play on smartphone is a terribile experience, it becomes hot in like 10 min and battery life is less than 2 hours, I understand why they choose to have good battery life and comfortable user experience.

definitely need good battery life. downclocking it will help heat but you won't be actually holding the part of the console that heats up unlike a smartphone. you'll be holding it by the joycons.
 

Easy_D

never left the stone age
And this why I hate Nintendo, such low powered shite! 3rd party devs will not develop games with this crap in mind, yet again Nintendo are not 'getting' it.

Rise of the Tomb Raider was ported to Xbox 360. Repeat after me:

It's not the specs, it's the sales.


Shit I've wanted a portable Gamecube-tier portable forever so a portable Wii U is fine with me to be honest.
 

Matbtz

Member
We saw it can run BotW quite smoothly, so I'll wait the January event before going all out on how Nintendo is doomed.
 
Again, I was obviously talking about the special edition.

Skyrim Special Edition is not exactly remake. It has some touches here and there but it's still Skyrim. Lowering the resolution to 720p from 1080p (that it had on current gen consoles) and I don't see how it couldn't be possible with these specs. Switch is still going to be decent bit above WiiU.
 

LordKano

Member
Yeah, like 3DS getting good third party support. Rumor has it Monster Hunter is leaving Nintendo for PS4 and when it's gone there will be nothing else left but Etrian Odyssey and Inazuma Eleven.

Seriously, this sounds like a freaking crisis for Nintendo. I hope they're paying western third party some very good money to keep them there. Otherwise NoA and NoE shutting down will be reality.

This meltdown is ridiculous.
 
Yeah, like 3DS getting good third party support. Rumor has it Monster Hunter is leaving Nintendo for PS4 and when it's gone there will be nothing else left but Etrian Odyssey and Inazuma Eleven.

Seriously, this sounds like a freaking crisis for Nintendo. I hope they're paying western third party some very good money to keep them there. Otherwise NoA and NoE shutting down will be reality.

Ignoring the hyperbole, give me some receipts.
 

Persona7

Banned
Wonder if they can hit 1080p and 60FPS with smash bros considering the OS overhead. Should be light but who knows with the recording software or whatever this thing will have.
 

MuchoMalo

Banned
Usually in the mobile space they measure the performance of the gpu in the number of operation it can do half precision or FP16. So when converted into full precision the number is halved.

The numbers he's using for Switch are half-precision.


The only saving grace for this is if it has 4 SMs. It would explain the need for a fan at least. I highly doubt it though, since that would substantially increase the cost of the chip.



By the way, for the people excited about it being weak, I hate to burst your bubbles but lowering clock speeds doesn't save any money other than increasing yields. It's still gonna be at least $250.

Wonder if they can hit 1080p and 60FPS with smash bros considering the OS overhead. Should be light but who knows with the recording software or whatever this thing will have.

Smash is already 1080p60 on Wii U.
 

Durante

Member
But the money question: if it really is 153 GPU GFlops in portable mode, is it actually weaker than the Wii U? I understand GFlops don't always translate 1-to-1?
It's probably a bit higher in effective performance in most workloads, even in portable mode.

More importantly (especially since people ask "how can it run Skyrim"), it also has access to a lot more memory and a faster CPU.
 
Nintendo are such a joke. Just get out of the hardware business already. I'm sure this thing will have a tiny battery and all kinds of build quality issues, too.

Stick to NES Classic style toys and let the big boys handle real consoles.
 

BreakAtmo

Member
It doesn't. The CPU is better, the RAM is better, but the GPU is weaker than Wii U on paper and no more than 10% faster in practice. It's just a Wii U with better hardware that can play Wii U-level games with newer effects (not necessarily better) at 720p on the go and 1080p at home.

This is a more modern chip with different architecture and FP16, and as DF said, they don't know what potential custom work may have been done to this thing to improve it further. As they said, this is just the clock speeds.
 
This will be $300 on release and you'll still buy it for the IP, and Nintendo will not lose a cent on the sale of the hardware.
 

SSM25

Member
Man, I'm so frustrated.. I was hoping for the return of the old nintendo.. hoy many engineer hours are needed to cut clock speeds to a two year old SoC ?
 

komplanen

Member
So it's significantly more underpowered than people expected. And what people expected was a console significantly underpowered compared to PS4.

I don't know what is going on anymore, Nintendo.
 
With Switch being so weak compared to the One/PS4 and Pro/Scorpio (obviously), will we see a new home console from Nintendo in one or two years?

What makes the Switch so desirable to me, is the fact, that Nintendo can concentrate their developing might on one device only...but if that isn't really the case, I wouldn't be too happy about it. Nobody knows, right?
 
It's probably a bit higher in effective performance in most workloads, even in portable mode.

More importantly (especially since people ask "how can it run Skyrim"), it also has access to a lot more memory and a faster CPU.

Well, the joke is that Skyrim isn't even confirmed.
 

nbnt

is responsible for the well-being of this island.
That's good news because it means less money to pay for the thing. It's not like Nintendo is suddenly going to get all the third party support if they made a supercomputer, so why bother?
 
Rise of the Tomb Raider was ported to Xbox 360. Repeat after me:

It's not the specs, it's the sales.


Shit I've wanted a portable Gamecube-tier portable forever so a portable Wii U is fine with me to be honest.

But it is, I mean it's so underpowered, anything they dev on better hardware just won't make the cut, will be hobbled to shit! Switch will attract the same Nintendo devotees whom are not really interested with the kind of games that are on other consoles anyway, same old same old.
 
I mean if Nintendo ups their output and lands some good 3rd party games it'll do at least better than the Wii U. Power is a necessary thing for games, and not just for graphics but portability matters for many games.

That being said if this is true so many people are going to eat crow on this lmaoooo.
 

KingSnake

The Birthday Skeleton
If it was more powerful than the battery life will be bad and people complain.

If the battery life is long but the specs are lower than the Shield TV than people will complain.

Nintendo can never win.

Go away with this bullshit. There are a lot of shades of grey in between. The battery life doesn't explain why the Switch is way below Tegra X1 capabilities while docked.
 

Ouroboros

Member
I really don't care about specs. I loved the 3DS library and it was outputting 240p. If I get the same quality of games for the Switch like I did for the 3DS that is fine.
 
LOL at people acting like this is a last-minute downgrade and Switch is any less powerful than it was planned to be as of three or six months ago.

It wasn't going to get current-gen AAA ports anyway, with few exceptions. Get another platform for those, deal with it.
 
D

Deleted member 125677

Unconfirmed Member
sounds par for the course, weak specs, tries to sell the thing as a unique concept.

I don't really care that much, it'll be a mostly Nintendo exclusive sidekick console for me. But it'd be cool if the thing was at least able to run some neat multiparty titles like Rocket League etc properly on the go.
 
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