mario_O
Member
it would be necessary if you have more juice to run the system faster without the battery constraints.
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A Nintendo Switch has been taken apart
- Thread starter Dystify
- Start date
it would be necessary if you have more juice to run the system faster without the battery constraints.
LordOfChaos
Member
Smaller pixel apertures mean a proportionally stronger backlight needed to push equal light through.
People are complaining about 3-5 hour battery life...720p seems fine, all things considered. It's Nintendo, I'm half just praising the stars for a sane screen
lwilliams3
Member
Yes, I was thinking about PS4-Pro's boost mode. I wonder if the Foxconn numbers is pointing towards something like that.
Skittzo0413
Member
I agree that it's very doubtful, it's just a bit odd that Eurogamer is still the one source we have to go on for that at this point. I'm like 95% convinced their info is accurate and the GPU clocks will change between docked and undocked, I'm just trying to remind people here that this feature is not yet 100% confirmed.
With the added info that some companies have a higher desired bar and pay the higher price if they can, whereas I think Nintendo's bar is at the low end (Just acceptable) . They'll take the cheapest full stop
We do have official word from Nintendo that the games run at different resolutions and settings when docked/undocked, I don't think there is any worry to be had here, particularly because it would just mean that the docked clocks would magically be the only clocks, and thus we don't have to worry about performance in a handheld mode, so our speculation is on the safe side, as it makes logical sense and isn't just based on eurogamer's leak but many rumors and speculations over the past year.
Matt said that Switch is "stronger than Wii U" when undocked and "a good deal stronger" when docked, that's another hint.
And to be honest, unless the 307MHZ from DF isn't the *fixed* clock in portable mode (but there's really no reason to doubt that), i don't see how undocked Switch could have enough horsepower to run MK8D at 2.25x the resolution.
What i mean is that what you're suggesting only makes sense if the Switch base clock is the same between docked and undocked, but higher than what DF suggested. There's also the possibility that devs can target a lower clock to save battery life if they need less power to run their game at 720p, but it can't be 307MHZ both docked and undocked considering MK8D, Fast RMX and Snake Pass docked resolutions.
That's just not an appropriate reading of the Switch. The system is full of impressive tech, and isn't really "cheap" in any way.
Could it have been more powerful? Yes. But that's true of every system ever released.
Skittzo0413
Member
Ah I did forget about Matt's hint. But what I'm suggesting is that it could (very unlikely) maintain something like 768MHz at all times, which would enable 1080p output when docked but explain why not every 720p game is 1080p docked.
But yeah like you guys are saying this seems very unlikely, so I can drop it off you want.
I know you didn't say that, but i'm gonna take this as a hint that the DF clocks are real and stop with the speculation. I'm kind of tired of it after 2 years lol
Oh don't stop speculating for me, it's always nice to see different and well motivated points of view
Anyway i don't see Splatoon 2 being the game that needs to run in 720p at docked speeds, of all games. I think it's more likely that they optimized the game for portable mode first, and they'll bump the res with the docked clock in the last few months before launch.
But yeah personally like i said i think i'm gonna stick with DF and retire from the speculation, the console is coming out and it is what it is. If the Foxconn leak numbers were correct (even partially, like just the GPU uplock) i'll be happy, otherwise it's still okay.
The most logical upgrade path would be to wait for the handheld to be capable of the docked device's performance and then upgrade. Also adding a 1080p screen.
Which with Eurogamer's clocks could be anytime as moving to 16nm would be more than enough to achieve that.
After that, they could simply do it again. TSMC is searching for a place to put a 5nm/3nm fab out in the wild. I mean quantum theory be damned, but if that comes to pass in 10 years, there is no reason we couldn't see a handheld with a GTX 1060 performance level, targeting a 1080p resolution and dock to hit 4k.
LordOfChaos
Member
*Advertising theory be damned, lol.
They aren't breaking quantum law here because TSMC and Glofo and Samsung are guilty of advertising a node ahead of where Intel measures things, and Moores general observation was predicted to come to a grinding halt by Intel 5nm standards, not TSMCs which would be more like Intel 7nm, while their 7nm would be more like Intel 10nm, etc.
*Advertising theory be damned, lol.
They aren't breaking quantum law here because TSMC and Glofo and Samsung are guilty of advertising a node ahead of where Intel measures things, and Moores general observation was predicted to come to a grinding halt by Intel 5nm standards, not TSMCs which would be more like Intel 7nm, while their 7nm would be more like Intel 10nm, etc.
Quantum problems should show up around 5nm/3nm nodes with TSMC's measurements if they scale the way they have been. Intel is currently having some issues with 10nm as it is.
LordOfChaos
Member
Oh, yeah, I thought you meant breaking past the theoretical 5nm barrier. They're all having issues with quantum tunneling and all manner of funky stuff already.
lwilliams3
Member
I forgot that Matt said that.. Oh look, there is Matt. lol. At this time, I am taking the undock/docked mode info as almost a giving. The question now is if they will choose to keep the CPU speed the same in both modes, or if they are considering/planning to have a "boost-mode" like the PS4-Pro.
Hey Matt. What did you thought about the Wii U specifications?
I think that is a fair stance.I know you didn't say that, but i'm gonna take this as a hint that the DF clocks are real and stop with the speculation. I'm kind of tired of it after 2 years lol
Oh don't stop speculating for me, it's always nice to see different and well motivated points of view
Anyway i don't see Splatoon 2 being the game that needs to run in 720p at docked speeds, of all games. I think it's more likely that they optimized the game for portable mode first, and they'll bump the res with the docked clock in the last few months before launch.
But yeah personally like i said i think i'm gonna stick with DF and retire from the speculation, the console is coming out and it is what it is. If the Foxconn leak numbers were correct (even partially, like just the GPU uplock) i'll be happy, otherwise it's still okay.
ElMexiMerican
Member
Gotdatmoney
Member
I imagine it depends on what they game actually is. But this thing is not getting AAA Western support period. It's weaker than the current hardware by a good chunk and it's Nintendo.
Astral Dog
Member
lwilliams3
Member
Graphical settings will have to be adjusted, but AAA third party games can be ported if the publisher is willing.
I'm sort of curious what the potential cases are, but also happy I don't really understand what is going on in this thread or have my hopes hanging on any particular outcome.
I mean, more powerful within reasonable heat/consumption/battery life envelope the better, but the thing already wasn't going to get ports of resource heavy (with respect to Xbox and PS) AAA games anyway and I don't really care if it does. I really didn't expect that of a hybrid, Nintendo console.
I'm only really worried insofar as it might get in the way of some ports of relatively less draining Japanese games, which I would like to come to the system in large numbers. That's a lower threshold and I don't think it is the most important obstacle to Switch becoming the sort of one-stop Japan/Nintendo console I'd like it to be, complementing a PC perfectly.
Idk. Maybe I'm wrong but I just get the impression that even the low end specs in here are competent hardware for the hybrid vision.
I mean, more powerful within reasonable heat/consumption/battery life envelope the better, but the thing already wasn't going to get ports of resource heavy (with respect to Xbox and PS) AAA games anyway and I don't really care if it does. I really didn't expect that of a hybrid, Nintendo console.
I'm only really worried insofar as it might get in the way of some ports of relatively less draining Japanese games, which I would like to come to the system in large numbers. That's a lower threshold and I don't think it is the most important obstacle to Switch becoming the sort of one-stop Japan/Nintendo console I'd like it to be, complementing a PC perfectly.
Idk. Maybe I'm wrong but I just get the impression that even the low end specs in here are competent hardware for the hybrid vision.
You and many others need to ditch the mindset that the only way to be successful as a gaming platform is by slavishly following the strategies laid our by Sony and Microsoft and their home consoles.
Astral Dog
Member
nothing Nintendo has shown so far implies that, not all at least
QUOTE=guek;230844753]You and many others need to ditch the mindset that the only way to be successful as a gaming platform is by slavishly following the strategies laid our by Sony and Microsoft and their home consoles.[/QUOTE]
yeah, the Switch will have to stand on its own, but sometimes get very platforms out it like 3DS, we will see if Switch is attractive enough for consumers and developers the coming months
lwilliams3
Member
Implies what? Publishers are understandably hesitant after there Wii U's "success," and dev kits weren't available for alot of devs until July. Time will tell, but it will be up to mostly Nintendo to start and maintain the system's sales for this year.
Its Quite Toasty
Banned
I wouldn't say that the switch needs third parties, Nintendo has done pretty well with the 3ds without most of them. I do however think it's foolish to disregard the power triple a third parties would bring to the switch. Its not about following Microsoft and sony when nintendos own history is rooted in third party along with first party.
Actually, this isn't an entirely unrealistic scenario. The Vita already does something to this effect, where the GPU dynamically clocks within a set range depending on mode. By default the Vita GPU runs at 111-166MHz, but can also run at 166-222MHz with wifi disabled.
The Switch could be doing something similar, which would explain why there's such a large range in expected battery life for different games. It could be that the DF quoted clockspeeds are base speeds and the CPU and GPU can boost up a little from there when stressed. That way a taxing game like Zelda might be running at boost speeds a majority of the time, hence the 3 hour battery life, whilst a simpler game that rarely boosts could hit Nintendo's 6 hour estimate. It's a smarter way to maximise battery life than forcing devs into fixed clockspeed brackets.
Of course this is 100% my own personal fanfiction, so don't actually expect it to happen, I'm just saying it's not impossible.
I agree 100%. I merely disagree strongly that equivalent graphical power is absolutely necessary in order to garner either third party support or commercial success. The Switch can be much weaker than XB1/ps4 and still sell very well. If it fails, the specs may or may not contribute to the outcome but specs won't be the essential factor that determines its fate.
Its Quite Toasty
Banned
Oh. Then yeah I agree with you.
It was a weird machine that suffered from Nintendo's slavish devotion to backwards compatibility.
The last three Nintendo consoles have been under specced versus the competition. Wii captured the zeitgeist and was lightning in a bottle. Wii U attracted token 3rd party software and was a failure. Switch? I look at that picture of upcoming games and I find it really hard to believe that it will be successful. 1-2 switch is no Wii sports and the lineup consists of old Indie games, old Wii u ports/remasters and a few token admittedly excellent looking 1st party titles.
It's not "following a strategy" it's ensuring your platform can play host to a robust library of AAA western games.
Edit: Wildcards are obviously Pokemon and Animal crossing existing on the Switch. Will be interesting to see what these franchises do for it.
The Eurogamer clocks are fine, some big games that Max out 5+ cores on other consoles are definitely going to be an issue for the Switch, but the APIs in Switch are designed around low cpu requirements as seen in vulkan. That is why some games that might max out 4 PS4 cores and use a bit of what's left, might have an easy enough time to be ported over reasonably.
GPU doesn't change much between eurogamer's and foxconn's clocks, it's pretty much going to help give the system a steadier frame rate but that's about it.
And low power requirements. Needing the embedded memory from nec completely drew out what the end results would be, we just didn't really know those things at the time and were working with nearly twice the tdp.
3DS was much the same, and is currently the most sold "current gen" device on the market. Eurogamer's spotless record confirmed Pokémon Stars so there is your wildcard. Splatoon is an enormous new IP in Japan that easily sold 1m more Wii U consoles to the Japanese, and is still seen in the top 20 over there after nearly 2 years.
Switch has a great advantage that is being slept on vs all previous Nintendo consoles since the N64 and that is that it isn't competing with another internal Nintendo platform for resources and games.
Forgot to mention that this is the first time big western publisher can take their AAA games and bring them to the handheld market without having to heavily rework it.
GPU doesn't change much between eurogamer's and foxconn's clocks, it's pretty much going to help give the system a steadier frame rate but that's about it.
And low power requirements. Needing the embedded memory from nec completely drew out what the end results would be, we just didn't really know those things at the time and were working with nearly twice the tdp.
3DS was much the same, and is currently the most sold "current gen" device on the market. Eurogamer's spotless record confirmed Pokémon Stars so there is your wildcard. Splatoon is an enormous new IP in Japan that easily sold 1m more Wii U consoles to the Japanese, and is still seen in the top 20 over there after nearly 2 years.
Switch has a great advantage that is being slept on vs all previous Nintendo consoles since the N64 and that is that it isn't competing with another internal Nintendo platform for resources and games.
Forgot to mention that this is the first time big western publisher can take their AAA games and bring them to the handheld market without having to heavily rework it.
ShadowFox08
Member
The Switch isn't even out yet, so you really can't really judge that it would fail right out of the gae. It seems pretty clear to me that Nintendo is rushing the Switch, and it shows from their of info for the OS(OS features, lack of web browser, netflix), online content, and around 7 games at launch. Come November, and Nintendo is going to have really really strong support from japanese devs. Hell the 1st party alone would blow Wii U's in their first three years if everything comes out as planned from Nintendo's end(Splatoon 2, Super Mario Odyssey, Xenoblade Chronicles 2) and leaks(Super Smash Bros 4, Pokemon Stars). Also we haven't heard of all the 3rd party support for this fall/winter yet either. I feel fairly confident we'll hear something from activision and ubisoft. Would be legit surprised if we don't get an assassins creed and call of duty game this year from them.
Also another factor is that the portability factor is pretty underrated. Not just because it combines handheld and homeconsole install bases and it frees up nintendo devs time by focusing mostly on one platform, but a lot of people are interested in having a home console experience on the go. If the Switch is successful, you can expect Sony and Microsoft to emulate their success and make their hybrid versions also, just like how they emulated Wii's success with motion controls.
Sony is already successful chasing the other end of the market, to make a hybrid that plays ps4 games, we will be waiting a while, and by that time we should be expecting a ps5, pushing a hybrid would only hurt the ps5 unless Sony abandons the high end market, and it's pretty clear from Vita that they can't support 2 platforms.
I'd be very surprised if Microsoft jumps into the handheld market, I'm sure any market research would tell them to shrink a surface and keep it windows based at best.
goldenpp72
Member
The only way I could see Sony bailing out of the high end market, is if MS bailed out first, it's not as cut and dry as people think. If Sony released a wimpy PS5 portable and MS came out slugging out with a super console, it could be a disaster for them.
Nintendo for this system, will be banking on portable people more so than Console gamers, it's a tricky but interesting situation I think.
Spiral Insanity
Banned
I would advise against a positive outcome when big AAA titles get ported.
Velocity:Design:Comfort
Banned
Not to be a pedant, but the Gamecube was more powerful than the PS2. It was actually the Xbox that was the outlier at the time in many ways.
I've read that a few times but tbh I kinda disagree. It just seems they have different priorities and are deliberately doing this.
I mean they could have briefed third parties earlier but didn't, they could have released more games at launch but didn't, the OS seems more than ready for once, etc.
Wii U in comparison looked like a rushed launch to be on shelves at christmas with not much planned for the following months.
I'm not saying it's a good or bad strategy, fuck if I know if this thing is going to sell once the launch hype is gone.
Sorry, it isnt clear to me what you are saying here. I don't think with eurogamer's clock, that porting would be easy for big titles, but let's be real, the last two tumb raider games were on the 360.
Sony doesn't need Xbox in the market, we are already seeing AAA games that skip Xbox. PS5 being the only high end console in its generation would sell much like the PS4 is now, maybe even faster. There is a large enough base to not worry and it should get any 3rd party Nintendo platform game since these aren't drastically different architectures and all the hardware is supported across every major engine. (ARM, x86, AMD, Nvidia)
Nintendo's 3DS came out well into smartphone era and during the height of the Tablet craze. If it could manage 60M+ with Nintendo's resources divided, I think Switch is in a much stronger position and does still speak to console only gamers who still want to play Nintendo games.
The Switch isn't a Nintendo console, it's Nintendo finally bowing out of the console space to find their niche among all other devices, while focusing on the one market that is undisputibly their's, the Handheld market. Trust me, Sony doesn't want to make their PS5 a Handheld because they would directly compete with Nintendo in a market where Nintendo's IPs are absolute Kings. Besides Nvidia technology has stayed ahead of AMD in the GPU space forever and ARM is much more power efficient than x86 will ever be, so Nintendo has the technology advantages in the handheld market among their partners now.
This is why their E3 is so important, if they manage to rehype the system with some big exciting announcements like a new big and exciting IP from Retro and an exciting Metroid game as well as some surprising Exclusives similar to Bayonetta 2, they could ride that hype into the holidays with Mario waiting for them and let Pokémon catch them in early next year via Eurogamer's rumor and the rumor that Pokémon stars has seen a delay out of fall this year.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
By BC you surely refer to the CPU, right? I'm curious to hear what you consider their alternatives were for that timeframe.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
GameCube better be more powerful, albeit lacking full sized DVD discs hurt them, coming out more than a year later (technological advances were even faster to come out back then... less time between manufacturing node improvements too).
They could have gone with Jaguar, was A15 capable enough? Would have given them up to 2.5Ghz quad core fairly easily without breaking the power consumption demand much. Processed even at 32nm would have been a big deal for Wii U as well.
NEC's embedded memory forced the GPU's process node, if they had went without that, they could have gone for 32nm shrink with the embedded E6760 (39w on 40nm)
Honestly they should have just went with that GPU regardless, 570gflops would not have been great for 3rd parties working on the XB1 and PS4 in 2015+ but it would have at least been able to push 1080p of last gen games, which was what everyone expected Nintendo to do with all their 360+ talk.
Wii U in the end had a million problems, many were major.
Gamecube was MUCH more powerful than PS2 and launched at $199, the technology inside Gamecube was also designed in 1999 and had a primitive precursor to the pixel shaders graphics cards use today in the TEV units which were programmable to an extent afaik. Gamecube also released with the fasted CPU that generation, and is why both Microsoft and Sony went to IBM for their next consoles. Gamecube was the most advanced piece of technology until the 360 IMO. The big reason ports didn't come to Gamecube but did go to Xbox was because Nintendo didn't have 32MB ram, although it was much faster ram, developers could use PS2 as their lead platform and basically drop code onto the xbox and gamecube, the issue was that the gamecube's ran poorly because of the ram capacity while xbox would actually sometimes run too fast. The discs were a problem I guess, with 1.8GB you did have issues with games, but Gamecube did have better compression and XB360 got by on dual layer DVDs while PS3 had blurays with over 6x the capacity.
Elfotografoalocado
Banned
They could have used an AMD APU from the time with a 6000 series GPU and 2GB GDDR5 for a healthy ~500GFLOP GPU with a quad-core x86 CPU, possibly enough to receive many current-gen games.
Edit: or as Zom3ie says, quad core Cortex A15 at high frequency, bigger GPU than what it ended up having.
The funny thing is, they probably could have gotten BC with a cheap 729mhz Wii CPU soldered on as a co-processor and some t1sram, I mean the gamecube was produced at a profit in 2005 @ $99, and the Wii was likely well below that in production costs in 2012, so I imagine this would have been far cheaper than the expensive low performance they paid for in over engineering BC into Wii U.
It's just as it was said earlier in the thread, engineers jobs are to meet design goals at the cheapest possible price, but you put a room of engineers together and they will get excited about a project like building up legacy support to compete with modern consoles, honestly Wii U is as over engineered as the original XB1 or PS3.
it would have to depend on the game
Broken Hope
Member
My Switch is being unboxed, docked and used exclusively as a home console, so any games they are superior on the PS4 Pro will be purchased for that console.
Cuningas de Häme
Member
This. As always. Although I'd never buy a PS4 or XBox, I have a nice PC and most of the console games don't interest me in any way.
Switch has very unique premise for it. I am eagerly waiting for it. It will be used so much when I am not able to be on my PC.