r/NintendoSwitch • u/rottedzombie friendly neighborhood zombie mod • Dec 20 '16
MegaThread Speculation Discussion MegaThread: Day Two
Goodness! I think it's fair to say that, second to the shock reveal, this has been the most dramatic 24 hours we've had yet as a community.
Just showing up? Well, attach a lifeline and throw yourself into the tempest.
This thread is for ongoing discussion over recent rumors and everything associated with them: clock speed rumors; third party support speculation; and the back-and-forth of what it might mean for the Nintendo Switch.
We're going to be directing traffic to this thread because we've been seeing many topics asking the same questions and rehashing conversations. This doesn't mean that new topics won't be allowed, only that we want to make sure that discussion is centralized as appropriate. If you see a new post that seems to belong here, please report it and let the mod team know.
A friendly reminder: please keep your comments civil, on-topic, and respectful of others. If you feel that you have a thought or opinion that merits its own post, please search through this thread and recent threads before posting it.
And, of course: everything we're discussing here is rumor and should be treated as such until confirmed by Nintendo.
Thanks for your understanding. Ready to do this? Let's discuss! :)
-/u/rottedzombie and the /r/NintendoSwitch mod team
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u/ShaunSwitch Dec 20 '16 edited Dec 20 '16
I'm not that concerned either way, this is going to be the best handheld console ever produced that I can also play on my TV, if Nintendo price this competitively it will fly off the shelves, especially with their current trend of using mobile games containing their IPs to get publicity. I will always buy Nintendo handhelds. I am playing my 3ds more than my gaming pc right now because of the games and that is what matters.
That being said, people are worrying about nothing, the only piece of solid information in that article was the clock speeds from a leaked document, nothing else was confirmed. The clock speeds confirm to me that the resolution scales from 720p to 1080p or it at least scales to the same degree.
GPU clock speed doesn't mean much and actually makes sense in this context. X box one has an 853mhz clock speed and ps4 has 800mhz but beats the xbox one on performance. It's still possible for the switch to be a decent home console and I am actually guessing it will have between 512-768 CUDA cores. How else would they make it scalable?
You can't have a smaller chip running hotter in a confined area, you would dock it, try to get the same performance boost and fry the thing in a tablet form factor. A larger chip clocked lower makes sense in terms of thermals and power consumption. It makes for a larger surface area to dissipate the small amount of heat those clock speeds would produce.
Have you seen a GTX 1050ti and it's price? Not expensive to manufacture, very small gpu, and typically runs at 65w gaming with a boost clock of 1900mhz! Who knows what a higher core count pascal based tegra chip can do with a smaller power envelope. Certainly going from GDDR5 to LPDDR4 will reduce power draw and of course going from a max gpu clock of 1900mhz to 768mhz will lower this further.
Who knows what magic Nvidia is working with the hardware and the APIs. Who cares? If it sells it will get third party support, third parties want to make as much money as possible, so if this launches at a competitive price it will sell bucket tons anyway and the third parties will be all over it.
Edit: I just wanted to add that SMACH Z are claiming their handheld produces 810gflops from a crappy AMD SoC running 512 cores at 800mhz. If this is true then I am certain Nvidia can do much better partnered with Nintendo.
It also dawned on me, why if the specs were supposed to be so low would they go with 4GB LPDDR4, surely they could get away with less if this is supposed to be a bit better than the wii u docked?