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Digital Foundry: Nintendo Switch CPU and GPU clock speeds revealed

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MilesTeg

Banned
Yep. They're addressing a Japanese issue (death of consoles and big screen gaming) on a global scale, when the issues isn't global. If the console is as underpowered as rumoured (and in 2017 it will be underpowered even as a handheld), then it will make porting games either impossible or with severe downgrades. That means that Nintendo will have to singlehandedly make all the games themselves again, which they can't do. Nintendo is the best developer but the current environment demands some degree of third party support to keep from pigeonholing your device.

Seeing as they only have one device to develop for now, it should be easier for them to support it with games.

Agree that they are stuck in a Japan only mindset though.

Still need to see what kind of support this thing has. Mobile games are huge in Japan and worldwide, so if they are smart the Switch will be able to capitalize on that market.

Their online storefront needs to be similar to app store or google play. Try and allow the same stuff phones and tablets have, along with their own first party and mobile games, plus whatever is left of the Japanese handheld industry. Along with a cheap entry price it could be appealing to a wide demographic.
 

JustenP88

I earned 100 Gamerscore™ for collecting 300 widgets and thereby created Trump's America
They should've just called this thing the "Game Boy Advance 2" or some shit and positioned it as a portable with an easy "play on the big screen" solution.

The performance outlined here is leagues ahead of any other mainstream portable gaming device out there and the library, VC included, is almost guaranteed to be legendary. I feel like that slight shift in marketing narrative would frame this leak waaaaay differently.
 

Lebon14

Member
I agree with you in that people are being unrealistic, and I am happy with the specs, actually find it impressive for a handheld.

But this is the fault of Nintendo for marketing this as a console since the beginning. First they denied it was a hybrid, then they said it was a home console first and foremost. They created the unrealistic expectations

I agree with the statement in bold in I guess that's what set the expectations high. They should have market it as an handheld imo.

Um, no? People were expecting, for the most part, something about in between of the extremes that you stated, and what the specs actually are.

You are over exaggerating, and Nintendo underdelivered. Nobody expected what you quoted but the expectation was still not on the other extremity. The specs are worse than even the most level headed expectations. Just as nobody expected a portable PS4 at 199, people surely did not expect them to be THIS bad.
Um, yes? Look, from all the threads that got created over time, from the Pascal / Maxwell rumors, to the dev. kit stats leak, etc. people were always going "if it was using this (put more powerful variant here), it'll be better" or people debating that it would be a Pascal chip, not only because it has better watt/performance ratio but also because it is much more powerful. Then, that other rumor came along saying it was Maxwell. People were disappointed. Why? Because they expected THE BEST!! Same for the amount of RAM or the on-board storage available. Then, people saw this and were full-on disappointed because it does not have the best hardware within its cataegory.

And what did I quote exactly? Those are my own observations.

For the last part, check the quote above.
 
Home console first....you sure about that Nintendo?

The reveal video clearly indicates it's both a home & portable console, with an emphasis on portability. The "home console" line in some of the English press material is because...

1) The Wii U was a failure. If Switch is a replacement for the Wii U and in turn, fails, it leaves Nintendo's more lucrative DS/3DS line untouched.

2) Home consoles are more popular in the US than portable consoles are, especially for the demographic that they're targeting (adults in their 20s and 30s).

3) If the Switch does turn out to be more than $200, they can use the home console line to try to justify the higher price.

In the Japanese press material, they downplay the home console aspect, because in Japan, portable systems are much more popular than home consoles. In short, it's a marketing move and nothing more.
 

mario_O

Member
It's going to be more work for devs; they'll have to build the game to run in a 150gflops handheld first, and from there see what they can add to the 'docked mode". I wonder if this is going to hurt the full potential of the system.
 
Well....depends on what its being compared to.

Compared to the 3DS the Vita is a powerhouse.

Compared to the PS4, XBO the Wii U is weak.

Which all comes back to the issue Nintendo is gonna have with the Switch. Home console/handheld hybrid.

Home console first....you sure about that Nintendo?

It's a portable-console. It wouldn't be as the others unless it was much more expensive. Having said that, its more comparable as a console in power than than the Wii was to its competition.
 

Malakai

Member
Not many people read Thraktor's post I presume.

In terms of performance per watt, more SM cores at a lower frequency gives better performance in exchange for a bigger and more expensive chip. The article and any subsequent flop calculations are all under the assumption of using 2 SM cores.

Bascially, until we know the SM score count all Switch flop calculations are speculation.

Don't let facts get in the way of a good "Nintendo is releasing underpower trash for the fifth time" narrative.
 

Persona7

Banned
People tougth they were going to get a portable Geforce 1080 packed in a 5W device
quite amusing

Who thought this? The general expectation was an improved Tegra X1. So far it feels like there are more people who are laughing at people who expected that than actual people who expected that.
 
It's going to be more work for devs; they'll have to build the game to run in a 150gflops handheld first, and from there see what they can add to the 'docked mode". I wonder if this is going to hurt the full potential of the system.

Had an argument with someone on this, but I actually think it's going to be the other way around. You build your game targeting 1080p in docked mode & then the system automatically does the work for you of downscaling it to run properly in 720p portable mode (which requires much less GPU speed/power than 1080p does).
 
Its rough being a Nintendo fan.....

And its not because of specs but people always saying dumb shit on Nintendo related threads.

Being a Nintendo fan is rough because of "people"?

No. Why care what people say? What matters is what Nintendo does.

Being a Nintendo fan is rough because Nintendo constantly makes bone-headed decisions, and is completely out of touch with large portions of its own fan base.

Whether their call on the specs of the Switch ends up as one of those bone-headed decisions remains to be seen.
 

yuraya

Member
Looks like Nintendo is back to being Doomed.

Seriously tho this is kind of disappointing. Once again there won't be many 3rd party killer apps for Nintendo hardware. Either way the killer app for this thing was always the new Zelda game. Not launching with it and now being an underpowered will probably hurt the Switch in the beginning. Lots of droughts incoming since there is no backwards compatibility. Everyone better get that Skyrim since it will be like the only time sink with this device until Zelda and/or Pokemon come out for it. Also that Dark Souls 3 rumor was probably bullshit. Probably just Dark Souls 2 instead of or something.
 

Purest 78

Member
This console is dead on arrival from a home Console Standpoint. I see it selling less than Wiiu. It's only hope is if it takes off as a Handheld.
 
At first, this article seemed really disappointing. And then I read further, realized that Digital Foundary still suggests that, even in portable mode, this should outperform a WiiU.

To me, that is actially better than I expected. If this can run WiiU quality games at 1080p when docked or games that surpass WiiU handily when docked, and better than WiiU quality while portable, this thing will be awesome.
 
I can bet you that developers are targeting console mode and letting the resolution magic happen for portable mode. Somehow this "isn't a console" even though it'll be getting Dark Souls 3 and who knows what else?
For me it'll probably be a handheld, though. Amazing, it's something different depending on how you use it!

Also, I love how it's been repeatedly said that current-gen ports will be possible, but now everybody in this thread is like BUT THESE NUMBERS MEAN IT'S IMPOSSIBLE!

It's looking like the CPU is in the same league as the current-gen consoles, and the APIs and frameworks are there too. There's nothing stopping ports if developers really want to support the Switch. That was true before this article released, and it's still true now.

Add to this that we still have no idea what kind of customizations Nvidia made to the SoC. My god the hyperbole.
 

Occam

Member
I've been calling it a "sidegrade" for a while now because that's where I thought the strategy made sense. The model is Vita + Vita tv, though integrated better and with nintendo support. And that's not that bad. It will probably allow Nintendo to stay relevant in western markets. Just what I think.

I wish it was Vita-sized.
 
What I'd like to know is how the hell this can run that indie game that got announced a week or so back. Looking at these specs those have to be some next level bullshots.

SeasonsofHeaven_NX_Editeur_001.jpg


Or maybe it's doable what do I know...
 

Purest 78

Member
Being a Nintendo fan is rough because of "people"?

No. Why care what people say? What matters is what Nintendo does.

Being a Nintendo fan is rough because Nintendo constantly makes bone-headed decisions, and is completely out of touch with large portions of its own fan base.

Whether their call on the specs of the Switch ends up as one of those bone-headed decisions remains to be seen.

Exactly I've owned every single Nintendo Home console including The Virtual Boy. People need to get over that people blindly don't like Nintendo. Some people just are not happy with the Direction they've taken.

I hated the Wii and Wiiu nostalgia isn't enough for me to buy a switch. If they'd actually made a modern console for 1st time in 3 Generations. Then maybe they could have made me interested.
 

efyu_lemonardo

May I have a cookie?
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:DR

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 analysis and for bringing some sense into this thread!
Had to dig deep to find this post but it was well worth it.
 

Purest 78

Member
How can you determine how many it sells as a home console vs handheld? 🤔

I can't but For the console audience it's gonna flop hard similar to the WiiU. It's only shoot is if it takes off ass a handheld or possibly if it's extremely cheap.
 

LCGeek

formerly sane
Yep, like the people thinking they get a 1080 with a modern console.

No on the leaking side ever hinted at this. I literally said the other day the GPU was 2x-6x and that estimation especially the low end was talked down, seems I was on the mark considering the clockrate coming in to play

Only thing that miffs me is the low clockrate on the cpu, other then we have spot on about the the type of cpu being used.

The only reason that pascal is getting mentioned is cause people were hoping nintendo would go pascal and idiots thought automatically that meant the best of it. People ticked are just blowing up at reality setting in finally, yet I can comfortably say it to some now told you so. Wasn't on the bullseye but got a lot closer than most expected and it seems others would hope for. I haven't been idealistic since last year, but I'm not going to be downer on something I know is solid for it size/form. Until price is announced I won't gut nintendo, but if its 300$+ I will.

Vulkan was confirmed today, but I see people just want to focus on the easy stuff. We have a solid portable with TV out functions and plays nitnendo stuff that is pretty modern in featureset. All this thread proves like any other spec war thread related to nintendo is that nintendo is out of touch with high performance types, but this has been true since GC.
 

bomblord1

Banned
No on the leaking side ever hinted at this. I literally said the other day the GPU was 2x-6x and that estimation especially the low end was talked down, seems I was on the mark considering the clockrate coming in to play

Only thing that miffs me is the low clockrate on the cpu, other then we have spot on about the the type of cpu being used.

The only reason that pascal is getting mentioned is cause people were hoping nintendo would go pascal and idiots thought automatically that meant the best of it. People ticked are just blowing up at reality setting in finally, yet I can comfortably say it to some now told you so. Wasn't on the bullseye but got a lot closer than most expected and it seems others would hope for. I haven't been idealistic since last year, but I'm not going to be downer on something I know is solid for it size/form. Until price is announced I won't gut nintendo, but if its 300$+ I will.

Vulkan was confirmed today, but I see people just want to focus on the easy stuff. We have a solid portable with TV out functions and plays nitnendo stuff that is pretty modern in featureset. All this thread proves like any other spec war thread related to nintendo is that nintendo is out of touch with high performance types, but this has been true since GC.

Hey I've been waiting for you to post. I know you did a really vague "The CPU is slightly better" post quite a while ago. Is that still the case? Because given these clocks I'm wondering.
 
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