Kssio_Aug
Member
I don't know... I think it may be much easier to downgrade PS4 version of DQ to Switch rather than upgrading the 3DS version. 3DS Dragon Quest uses two screen, and the PS4 versions relies a lot in the art direction.
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
Digital Foundry: Nintendo Switch CPU and GPU clock speeds revealed
- Thread starter Vashetti
- Start date
- Status
I don't know... I think it may be much easier to downgrade PS4 version of DQ to Switch rather than upgrading the 3DS version. 3DS Dragon Quest uses two screen, and the PS4 versions relies a lot in the art direction.
Nintendos fault for leaving a 3 month gap in the messaging and letting people form these expectations from a 3 minute video. There is plenty of blame here and it starts with Nintendos messaging. I really do believe they are purposely misleading the messaging so they can premium price the product.
th3sicknness
Member
Nintendo has stated that the Switch is a home console first and wont be replacing the 3ds. I think this is why people are upset..but even if that was the case the performance while docked is more than the Wii U so not sure why people are upset.
Nah, it can fit in the unit just fine. It would only be 160mm^2 at most. Cost is the issue with that one.
Version 3.0
Member
It's unlikely they'll mentions specs during the event. And it's not a safe bet that we'll see anything that would put qualms about performance to rest, either.
Extremely unlikely. No I dare say, 100% not happening.
But we have a confirmation it's the 3ds version ?
Skittzo0413
Member
This is technically still a rumor, yeah. Albeit a very trustworthy one, considering the source. And clock speeds alone don't give us the full picture.
That said this is a very good reminder to expect the worst when it comes to Nintendo's hardware power. But like you said, nothing is confirmed.
PANIC!!!
EventHorizon
Member
I would think that the Switch's smaller surface area would explain a lot. It simply has less area to dissipate the heat.
Another thing that could be a factor is the need of the Switch to operate in docked mode. In that mode not only does it run hotter, but has a good portion of its surface covered. This could require the fan and air cooling which in turn could reduce the Switch's passive cooling effectiveness.
In such a small space, if air has to be able to circulate around or near the components to keep them cool, doesn't that mean less metal could be used to pipe heat away to the outside. In effect the heat sinks have to dump heat on the inside of the Switch in order for the air circulating there to pick up that heat and carry it away. So, in order to get the fans to work in docked mode, compromises had to be made which required the fans to work in portable mode too.
Disclaimer: I have no idea if this is correct. It just sounds like a design trade off that would have to be made.
I just gathered we're still missing important pieces of the puzzle, which is why theres a small section in that lengthy post just for potential hardware scenarios filled with hypothetical pieces.
Great post but the main issue still stands
as a home console presented and probably launched with an illusory western third party support it will flop harder than the wiiu (because people got burned by the wiiu)
I know that western third party support is determined also by other factors but still...
johnsavage
Member
He said 'many of us are grown ass adults' and proceeded to talk about how 'grown ass adults' feel. He did not say 'many grown ass adults'. I am a 'grown ass adult' too and know 'grown ass adult' people that don't care about this and would love to play things on the go. He does not speak for me. Also PS4/XOne/PCs exist already there doesn't need to be another one. If you've played Nintendo games in the last decade you should be know what you have to sacrifice to play Nintendo games and accept it as a 'grown ass adult' and not preach preference to an audience of people you don't know.
Hahaha. No expectations, no suffering.
Robert at Zeboyd Games
Banned
This is damage control & marketing just like calling the DS a "third pillar" was.
Tom Nook Sawyer
Member
What does SM mean?
Super Mario
(Streaming Multiprocessor in nVidia lingo. In the Maxwell generation, 1 SM is 128 CUDA cores)
They won't mention specs but we'll see how games look and they will certainly have some highly-demanding games, or even simply just third-party games.
Once again Nintendo didn't say this was a Uber powerful console. Seems like your hopes got the best of you and you are now lashing out at Nintendo. Soon as the leak of it being a hybrid I knew this would be a portable Wii U.
The 3 minute video showed
Hybrid concept
Wii U games/graphics
Can't see how Nintendo messed about with their messaging here.
The clock speeds are pretty much confirmed if DF got info from Switch documentation. What is not confirmed yet, though, is the architecture of the custom chip in the Switch, and, as Thraktor has perfectly outlined, a change in CUDA core count is a possibility. That change would improve the Switch's FLOP count significantly, so we indeed have no confirmation about its final power. That said, at this moment the currently discussed specs of 153 GFLOPS undocked and 393 GFLOPS docked are the most likely guess (though, again, they are by no means certain).
But emulations usually push the CPU, not the GPU.
Ruud_Luiten
Member
Who needs 3rd-parties, right?
Tom Nook Sawyer
Member
Thanks! Now what does that mean? Is it like cores?
Kssio_Aug
Member
Sex Machine
Because it'll still look identical to Wii U games, but in 1080p, and because there's no logical reason for Nintendo have done this. Even with Maxwell, it could have easily hit 500MHz when portable without a running fan. And it's not like it makes the unit any cheaper either, since there's not really any savings from just lowering the clock speed. At this point, a 3DS successor at a lower price would have been better for pretty much everyone.
I haven't had time to read through every response here, so I'm probably repeating what others have already said, but here are my thoughts on the matter, anyway:
CPU Clock
This isn't really surprising, given (as predicted) CPU clocks stay the same between portable and docked mode to make sure games don't suddenly become CPU limited when running in portable mode.
The overall performance really depends on the core configuration. An octo-core A72 setup at 1GHz would be pretty damn close to PS4's 1.6GHZ 8-core Jaguar CPU. I don't necessarily expect that, but a 4x A72 + 4x A53 @ 1GHz should certainly be able to provide "good enough" performance for ports, and wouldn't be at all unreasonable to expect.
Memory Clock
This is also pretty much as expected as 1.6GHz is pretty much the standard LPDDR4 clock speed (which I guess confirms LPDDR4, not that there was a huge amount of doubt). Clocking down in portable mode is sensible, as lower resolution means smaller framebuffers means less bandwidth needed, so they can squeeze out a bit of extra battery life by cutting it down.
Again, though, the clock speed is only one factor. There are two other things that can come into play here. The second factor, obviously enough, is the bus width of the memory. Basically, you're either looking at a 64 bit bus, for 25.6GB/s, or a 128 bit bus, for 51.2GB/s of bandwidth. The third is any embedded memory pools or cache that are on-die with the CPU and GPU. Nintendo hasn't shied away from large embedded memory pools or cache before (just look at the Wii U's CPU, its GPU, the 3DS SoC, the n3DS SoC, etc., etc.), so it would be quite out of character for them to avoid such customisations this time around. Nvidia's GPU architectures from Maxwell onwards use tile-based rendering, which allows them to use on-die caches to reduce main memory bandwidth consumption, which ties in quite well with Nintendo's habits in this regard. Something like a 4MB L3 victim cache (similar to what Apple uses on their A-series SoCs) could potentially reduce bandwidth requirements by quite a lot, although it's extremely difficult to quantify the precise benefit.
GPU Clock
This is where things get a lot more interesting. To start off, the relationship between the two clock speeds is pretty much as expected. With a target of 1080p in docked mode and 720p in undocked mode, there's a 2.25x difference in pixels to be rendered, so a 2.5x difference in clock speeds would give developers a roughly equivalent amount of GPU performance per pixel in both modes.
Once more, though, and perhaps most importantly in this case, any interpretation of the clock speeds themselves is entirely dependent on the configuration of the GPU, namely the number of SMs (also ROPs, front-end blocks, etc, but we'll assume that they're kept in sensible ratios).
Case 1: 2 SMs - Docked: 384 GF FP32 / 768 GF FP16 - Portable: 153.6 GF FP32 / 307.2 GF FP16
I had generally been assuming that 2 SMs was the most likely configuration (as, I believe, had most people), simply on the basis of allowing for the smallest possible SoC which could meet Nintendo's performance goals. I'm not quite so sure now, for a number of reasons.
Firstly, if Nintendo were to use these clocks with a 2 SM configuration (assuming 20nm), then why bother with active cooling? The Pixel C runs a passively cooled TX1, and although people will be quick to point out that Pixel C throttles its GPU clocks while running for a prolonged time due to heat output, there are a few things to be aware of with Pixel C. Firstly, there's a quad-core A57 CPU cluster at 1.9GHz running alongside it, which on 20nm will consume a whopping 7.39W when fully clocked. Switch's CPU might be expected to only consume around 1.5W, by comparison. Secondly, although I haven't been able to find any decent analysis of Pixel C's GPU throttling, the mentions of it I have found indicate that, although it does throttle, the drop in performance is relatively small, and as it's clocked about 100MHz above Switch to begin with it may only be throttling down to a 750MHz clock or so even under prolonged workloads. There is of course the fact that Pixel C has an aluminium body to allow for easier thermal dissipation, but it likely would have been cheaper (and mechanically much simpler) for Nintendo to adopt the same approach, rather than active cooling.
Alternatively, we can think of it a different way. If Switch has active cooling, then why clock so low? Again assuming 20nm, we know that a full 1GHz clock shouldn't be a problem for active cooling, even with a very small quiet fan, given the Shield TV (which, again, uses a much more power-hungry CPU than Switch). Furthermore, if they wanted a 2.5x ratio between the two clock speeds, that would give a 400MHz clock in portable mode. We know that the TX1, with 2 SMs on 20nm, consumes 1.51W (GPU only) when clocked at about 500MHz. Even assuming that that's a favourable demo for the TX1, at 20% lower clock speed I would be surprised if a 400MHz 2 SM GPU would consume any more than 1.5W. That's obviously well within the bounds for passive cooling, but even being very conservative with battery consumption it shouldn't be an issue. The savings from going from 400MHz to 300MHz would perhaps only increase battery life by about 5-10% tops, which makes it puzzling why they'd turn down the extra performance.
Finally, the recently published Switch patent application actually explicitly talks about running the fan at a lower RPM while in portable mode, and doesn't even mention the possibility of turning it off while running in portable mode. A 2 SM 20nm Maxwell GPU at ~300MHz shouldn't require a fan at all, and although it's possible that they've changed their mind since filing the patent in June, it begs the question of why they would even consider running the fan in portable mode if their target performance was anywhere near this.
Case 2: 3 SMs - Docked: 576 GF FP32 / 1,152 GF FP16 - Portable: 230.4 GF FP32 / 460.8 GF FP16
This is a bit closer to the performance level we've been led to expect, and it does make a little bit of sense from the perspective of giving a little bit over TX1 performance at lower power consumption. (It also matches reports of overclocked TX1s in early dev kits, as you'd need to clock a bit over the standard 1GHz to reach docked performance here.) Active cooling while docked makes sense for a 3 SM GPU at 768MHz, although wouldn't be needed in portable mode. It still leaves the question of why not use 1GHz/400MHz clocks, as even with 3 SMs they should be able to get by with passive cooling at 400MHz, and battery consumption shouldn't be that much of an issue.
Case 3: 4 SMs - Docked: 768 GF FP32 / 1,536 GF FP16 - Portable: 307.2 GF FP32 / 614.4 GF FP16
This would be on the upper limit of what's been expected, performance wise, and the clock speeds start to make more sense at this point, as portable power consumption for the GPU would be around the 2W mark, so further clock increases may start to effect battery life a bit too much (not that 400-500MHz would be impossible from that point of view, though). Active cooling would be necessary in docked mode, but still shouldn't be needed in portable mode (except perhaps if they go with a beefier CPU config than expected).
Case 4: More than 4 SMs
I'd consider this pretty unlikely, but just from the point of view of "what would you have to do to actually need active cooling in portable mode at these clocks", something like 6 SMs would probably do it (1.15 TF FP32/2.3 TF FP16 docked, 460 GF FP32/920 GF FP16 portable), but I wouldn't count on that. For one, it's well beyond the performance levels that reliable-so-far journalists have told us to expect, but it would also require a much larger die than would be typical for a portable device like this (still much smaller than PS4/XBO SoCs, but that's a very different situation).
TL
Each of these numbers are only a single variable in the equation, and we need to know things like CPU configuration, memory bus width, embedded memory pools, number of GPU SMs, etc. to actually fill out the rest of those equations to get the relevant info. Even on the worst end of the spectrum, we're still getting by far the most ambitious portable that Nintendo's ever released, which also doubles as a home console that's noticeably higher performing than Wii U, which is fine by me.
Thank you for the in-depth explanation. Good to see some actual tech knowledge in this thread. I think your case two is the most likely scenario (least I hope for it). I still know this system will be amazing!
True, independent of the exact FLOP rate, having some demanding third party AAA game run on the Switch at the event should be enough evidence that third parties can run on the system. If they are absent, however, we have likely evidence that it is not strong enough. In any case, the January event will be illuminating in that regard as well.
I actually don't know how well an quad-core A57 would emulate a Gamecube.
AtomicShroom
Member
I'm not sure what they mislead exactly... the console is exactly as demonstrated in the reveal video, down right to the Wii U levels of graphics. If anything, they were surprisingly honest!
Its not Nintendo's fault people still think they make hardware that is relevant power wise.
I wonder how much of the slowdowns we have seen in footage of zelda is indicative of what the Switch version will also exhibit.
I think I messed up the dimensions somehow. OK, then.
Skittzo0413
Member
Would adding a third SM cost more than increasing the size of the battery? I think this is the tradeoff that may have been made there, as higher clock speeds for 2 SMs requires a larger battery.
Someone send out the Matt Signal!
I'm sure if it could have easily hit 500MHz Nintendo would have allowed it.
Nintendo lowered this mainly due to battery and heat. They wanted a comfortable handheld that's slim and doesn't get hot and has okayish battery.
3DS successor wouldn't have done so great. I'm sure this hardware with the Switch will become so cheap a year after release they can release a smaller version for a cheaper price to appease the 3DS gamers.
Doctor_Thomas
Member
My journey with Nintendo already ended with the Game Cube, but I feel like this is just another step away from me. It's a handheld that outputs to TV and it's BS to try to pass that off as a home console or pretend it'll have third party support like the other two consoles.
Why wouldn't FFXV ported to Switch look closer to what Xenoblade Chronicles X achieved on the Wii U when the Switch is, at worst, better than the Wii U?
Movalpolos
Banned
So, it can't even run current gen games...
I wasn't expecting Switch to be powerful but at least on par with X1. This shit better be under $200 at release.
I wasn't expecting Switch to be powerful but at least on par with X1. This shit better be under $200 at release.
Fourth Storm
Member
Hey, thanks for the shout out. Haha. I don't have much time for detailed analysis these days. I would refer to Thraktor's post to get a good idea of the possibilities. Personally, we keep hearing that the specs are comparable to Tegra X1 from sources, so I don't see any reason to speculate higher. Making Switch comparable to Wii U in portable mode and 2x Wii U while docked seems just like them. Still, there is the question of why the fan is supposedly active in portable mode. *shrug* Just gonna wait and see this time.
Tom Nook Sawyer
Member
Got it, thanks!
Its the current clocks than don't add up, the current profile would draw a very, very low amount of power that should have very little trouble passively cooling even in docked mode and without a fan. Its a tiny TDP as currently laid out. The Pixel C has a hotter CPU set-up clocked at nearly twice the rate, and has a slightly higher clocked GPU and it gets by just fine with minor throttling in a thinner package with a metal backplate.
That's why it makes no sense. You could just have had a metal backplate and a simple fan in the dock for this kind of use if you had some reason to worry about minor heat dissipation issues. Putting the fan *in* the unit and it seemingly running in portable with these clocks is a big ?????.
GhostTrick
Banned
As I said, 500mhz wasnt out of reach at all. Heck even 700mhz. My take on it is that Nintendo either wanted a battery life up to 8 hours... Or just decided that they rather have a 2 dollars battery rather than a 4 dollars one so they lowered the clocks.
ultrazilla
Member
KIMISHIMA, DROP THE BOMB!
Junior needs to be powered up to "member" for this one! OMG 😂 😆 One of the best Nintendo gifs ever!!!
No idea, but if it's two SMs what I can say is that Nintendo used a terrible, tiny battery again if the 3-hour rumor was ever true.
Because troll.
Though it would also be good if FF XV could achieve what XenobladeX did.
I don't give a shit anymore. Just give me some good games Nintendo!
Yep, it's powerful enough. Give it a nice price and some great games and I'll eventually pick it up.
AtomicShroom
Member
Probably none if we're to judge from the demonstration at the Tonight Show. This game still has at least a couple of months of polish to go.
Joelstinton14
Member
Why would it flop harder than the wii u? Power is not the only thing that makes up a console.
The Switch is an entirely different product that has different design goals, for starters Nintendo seems to know what the device is, and it looks easily marketable. Way to early to write this off.
- Status