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Digital Foundry: Nintendo Switch CPU and GPU clock speeds revealed

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asagami_

Banned
Japanese support (outside big-games from Square-Enix) will be fine. Indies too.

Western 3rd party? Maybe, unless they reach a compromise. Still, it's more important the development tools to adjusts the games to the Switch. It should be easier than Wii U, basically.
 

BGBW

Maturity, bitches.
They've always pushed it as a home console, yeah. I dunno why I'm seeing Nintendo fans change the narrative to "it's a 3DS successor" recently. Nintendo never said it was and have always pushed it as a home console with a hybrid gimmick.

I find myself playing on my 3DS more than my television consoles so for me the Switch will be my next handheld. It's promoted as both.

For those who wanted a 100% new television console these alleged spec could be disappointing, but for those looking forward to a new handheld system from Nintendo this all seems fine.
 

AEREC

Member
I don't want to be the person to say I told you so but I told you so.

People were saying Switch will be more powerful than NVidia Shield TV. I always said it will just about matching NVidia Shield TV in docked mode and will be weaker in portable mode.

Good job dude...I guess you won..something.

"Told you so" posts when addressing the internet make no sense.
 

prag16

Banned
Wow. That's lower then even the most pessimistic predictions (aside from a few outliers). WUST redux. Sounds like X1 at 20nm. Disappointing.

Could this mean a $199 launch price?

It better. Any higher than that and I sit out the launch if this is accurate. My phone is beefier.
 

Vena

Member
Even Laura Kate Dale is saying she's confident the system would outperform the wiiU in handheld mode which would wouldn't be possible running the system with the default X1 configuration at the given clocks.

While I don't doubt the numbers, the use of the A57/2SM Maxwell, doesn't end up making as much sense with said numbers since then it crashes with other rumors/info... from Laura and/or Matt.

That CPU has the potential to be a bottleneck for WiiU ports... ?_?_?_?_?

Is it possible the differentiation in rumors and this news is because Nintendo lowered specs shortly before release, much like they did with Wii U?

This would be a drop much closer to release than WiiU.
 

takriel

Member
Did we reslly expect anything less from Nintendo? I sure didn't although I wanted something different. Nintendo bowed out of the arms race a long long time ago.

Nintendo is known for its awesome games and they will continue to do the same on Switch. This will of course alienate the 3rd party devs who will refuse to dumb down their franchises for the Switch and in turn it may push away gamers who just want one box and prefer it to be Nintendo for all their gaming needs.
You mean "did we really expect anything more from Nintendo?"
 
Wow. That's lower then even the most pessimistic predictions (aside from a few outliers). WUST redux. Sounds like X1 at 20nm. Disappointing.



It better. Any higher than that and I sit out the launch if this is accurate. My phone is beefier.

How much did your phone cost and is it really?
 

jackal27

Banned
The PS4 and the Xbone has completely disproven this hypothesis. Hell, so did the WiiU. Exclusives no longer sell consoles.

And even if it did sell consoles, tech specs have nothing to do with exclusives. In fact, sometimes it will land you exclusives since studios will think about the fact that they don't have to develop a new engine to make it, Bayonetta 2 and the Monster Hunter games being the perfect example.
 

bomblord1

Banned
Wow. That's lower then even the most pessimistic predictions (aside from a few outliers). WUST redux. Sounds like X1 at 20nm. Disappointing.



It better. Any higher than that and I sit out the launch if this is accurate. My phone is beefier.

No it's not
 

Ahmed360

Member
It is actually ok, I will treat it as a handheld and play with it.
For TV my PS4 Pro will do.
But my only hope is that they have a good IPS display not like the crap one on the 3DS.
 

aeroslash

Member
Oh Ninty...you did it again..

I passed on the wiiu, seems the same for this one! Was good to met you on your old golden days!
 

thefro

Member
Yeah.. one "source" tells us it's over 1TFLOP (still unlikely) and the other puts the figure towards the opposite end of the performance spectrum.

500 engineering hours. Someone tweet Jen-Hsun Huang to congratulate him, clearly, if they managed to convince Nintendo to have lower than TegraX1 performance, 2 years later, and still charge 500 engineering hours to Nintendo, they made the best technological heist of the 2010's

It's actually 500-man years of engineering.

NVidia Blog said:
But creating a device so fun required some serious engineering. The development encompassed 500 man-years of effort across every facet of creating a new gaming platform: algorithms, computer architecture, system design, system software, APIs, game engines and peripherals. They all had to be rethought and redesigned for Nintendo to deliver the best experience for gamers, whether they’re in the living room or on the move.
 

ghostwich

Member
Did we reslly expect anything less from Nintendo? I sure didn't although I wanted something different. Nintendo bowed out of the arms race a long long time ago.

Nintendo is known for its awesome games and they will continue to do the same on Switch. This will of course alienate the 3rd party devs who will refuse to dumb down their franchises for the Switch and in turn it may push away gamers who just want one box and prefer it to be Nintendo for all their gaming needs.

Given the lack of information (and the teaser trailers) I think everyone is trying real hard to get grips on the console's limits and capabilities.

Nintendo has never been known for the hardware (LOL @ Wii with its SD resolution) and more for the software but that advantage can only be milked for so long (or can it, look at the Zelda game and now nuts the hype is).
 
We had a dev on GAF confirm it at one point.



People on the board.

Are you referring to Arkam? IIRC, he said Nintendo made promises about performance that weren't matched by the actual dev kits, but not that his team had previously received a dev kit that actually delivered on those promises.
 

Oblivion

Fetishing muscular manly men in skintight hosery
I technically know why, I also know why it matters to a lot of NeoGAF because we're having a discussion here and that's fine, but I still feel compelled to ask:

Who cares?

This is freaking Nintendo we're talking about. How are you not used to this by now? How have you not come to expect this by now? How have you still not seen that the final product will rival and often surpass other hardware in terms of both beauty and performance?

I suppose it may be better to ask:

Why should I care?

I know that Nintendo uses underpowered hardware and I have for 10 years now. I know that Nintendo still makes the best, most creative, most well-designed games in the industry anyway. I know that this is going to be both a home and a portable console. I know this is going to have the combined output of their console and handheld games teams. Why should this affect any of those things?

Even if Titanfall 2 or Dark Souls 3 runs on my Switch, would I really purchase them there when I could likely find them on sale for $10 at that point for my PS4 or even more likely own them already in the first place? Probably not. Would 3rd party (particularly western) developers support Nintendo hardware even if it did match the PS4 in terms of power? Probably not. Would turning the thing into a hardware beast sell more Switch units? Probably not.

All that to say, yeah it is fine to be disappointed, but this hardly warrants some of the freak out I'm seeing. Nintendo consoles are just as strong as other consoles, their strength just lies in other places. Namely, their strong first party support, their couch multiplayer, and their creativity. It's gonna be fine.

Super Mario Galaxy was my favorite game of its generation, and it was running on garbage hardware. Still, having said that, having powerful hardware is always a good thing. Even if you don't care about third party games, having a beefy system will give the opportunity to make already great looking Nintendo games even better. Also, look at Zelda: BotW. It's a pretty great looking game, but even on Wii-U level hardware, it still suffers from quite a few poor textures and frame rate issue.
 

R1CHO

Member
The cpu is the big problem if this is real. Big big bottle neck for modern games. Loe powered gpu... well at handheld mode resolution is probably not that important.
 

meanspartan

Member
This is fucking why I wanted them to make a regular damn box with a controller and call it the Nintendo Entertainment System, at least as powerful as a Ps4.

You cant trust Nintendo with gimmicks, they ALWAYS sacrifice power for them.
 

TunaLover

Member
Yeah.. one "source" tells us it's over 1TFLOP (still unlikely) and the other puts the figure towards the opposite end of the performance spectrum.

500 engineering hours. Someone tweet Jen-Hsun Huang to congratulate him, clearly, if they managed to convince Nintendo to have lower than TegraX1 performance, 2 years later, and still charge 500 engineering hours to Nintendo, they made the best technological heist of the 2010's
It seems that Nintendo prioritise other factors instead raw power, namely system heat, battery life, price.
 

hivycox

Member
Can someone explain to me how they come up with the 1020 mhz clock on the cpu and the gpu clock speeds? It looks to me that they are just guessing these due to the fact that its smaller than the shield android TV

Furthermore their entire line of argumentation is almost non existent since they always rely on rumors (Spec info from twitter and that VentureBeat article).

So I'm kinda shocked that everybody is losing their minds about this! The CPU and GPU speeds can very well be higher than that.
 
Could this mean a $199 launch price?
Just bought a nvidia shield tablet new for under $199 which is more powerful and has a better display so this better be. He'll some prepaid phones are more powerful. This news makes it sound like the dock/home usage was an afterthought and it was originally designed to be only mobile.
 

mario_O

Member
mpKZg.png

lol
 

Anth0ny

Member
Welp. I was wrong. It really is just a portable Wii U and bumped-up one when docked. Can we officially call NateDrake a fake now? This really is just where the successor to the Vita would land. Skyrim will chug on this. It's weaker than the PS3 by a huge margin when portable. This is not a current-generation machine.

I'm sorry to all of the naysayers I argued with. You were right. I'll never be optimistic about Nintendo again.

it's ok friend. you're welcome on team pessimist, it's a lot easier over here.


i expected this shit from the start, hopefully it's $199 or I think they're gonna be fucked. no one wants to pay a premium for an under-powered machine. especially when a PS4 + game is already going for $250.
 

FaintDeftone

Junior Member
If its more powerful than Wii U, I am okay with that. I already have a PS4 Pro for my massive hi res games. I want my Nintendo style games and those do not require bleeding edge visuals for me.

This is pretty much where I'm at. As long as it isn't weaker than a Wii U, I'm a happy man. I think Nintendo does wonderful things with the aging Wii U hardware and I'm totally fine with retaining that type of graphics fidelity as long as Nintendo wises up with network infrastructure and online features while also getting third parties on-board.
 

guybrushfreeman

Unconfirmed Member
Make it cheap and announce a lot of games but I'm not confident..... After being burned on the Wii U it's hard not to be wary. Everything feels like it's going the same way
 

Markitron

Is currently staging a hunger strike outside Gearbox HQ while trying to hate them to death
Those Dark Souls trilogy rumors look a little silly now.

I'm assuming DS3 wouldn't run on this at all?
 

18-Volt

Member
Yes and the few we saw on the switch portable mode, it seems to run smoothly than Wii U

If Digital Foundry is right, then Zelda on portable mode wouldn't even reach 30fps. I still think they're bullshitting.You can't convince Take Two to make games for your console with those specs.

Presumably they don't want their unit to throttle clocks at any time.

Those specs are ion par with iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 won't even overheat if you push it to limit.
 

Peltz

Member
Nice to see Nintendo not getting a pass for limiting themselves with woefully subpar hardware. Can't wait to hear the price of this thing. As someone who doesn't care about portability, they can especially fuck right off if it's a cent over $199.99
I'm as big a Nintendo fanboy as there is. But they definitely should not get a pass on this one. I'm still in for the games, but their hardware choices are very stingy and I will be vocal about criticizing them.
 

Blobbers

Member
There's been a sea of rumors regarding the NX, but the funniest one now in hindsight is that Sony and Microsoft were making the PS4 Pro and Scorpio mainly because they learned of the NX's specs and they were worried it would make the PS4 and XB1 look too weak, it was that powerful.
 

NSESN

Member
Stop speculating on gflops without knowing the rest of the specs, it could have better or worse specs than expected.
It would not surprise me if nintendo made dome compromises on other aspects.
 

Metal B

Member
It's funny, how much more positive the complete article is in comparison to the comments here.

Eurogamer pretty much find the Switch impressive in what it is trying to be (and there is still room for some small positive imporvements). While many people find the device terrible for what it isn't, namily only a powerful console.

Let's compare the Switch to the other hybrid console/handheld gaming devises for 250€: {blank space}. Amazing isn't it.
 

LordOfChaos

Member
Are you sure?

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/df-hardware-wii-u-graphics-power-finally-revealed

320 stream processors at 550mhz provide indeed 353 gflops.

We also have games like Smash Bros running at native 1080p and 60fps, I really doubt a 176 GFLOPs GPU is able to achieve that.

Nearly certain from the die shot thread it's 176. That DF jumped the gun on early die shot speculation and was never updated accordingly, they're not infallible. The 320 stream processors don't make sense with that CU layout, die size, and fab process, half the die is eDRAM.

As for "X couldn't run on Y", looking pretty on some pretty crummy hardware is kind of Nintendos forte.
 
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