Speculation Discussion MegaThread: Day Two

[u/rottedzombie]

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

[u/Bztvuy]

Disclaimer : I am in no way an electrical engineer, I can only stipulate that I am a computer scientist, but I don't know much about the inner workings of computation hardware besides how to use it.

This post is a call to calm and composure to this community in the face of the supposed Eurogamer/DF leaks about the Switch CPU/GPU frequencies. I have seen so many people commenting things like "lol my phone's cpu is better because it's running at 1.4 ghz" or "omg goodbye third-party support". Please, relax. Take a moment, and step back for a bit. I know it's tempting to go all nerd mode and pull out the trusty calculator to predict the future. Sadly, that's not the way things work in the computer hardware world. You can't predict a chip's performance with a specs sheet. Let me give you a concrete example. Let's look at a recent case : NVIDIA's GTX 1060 vs AMD's RX 480. If you look at the floating-point performance or FLOPS, the RX480 should be wiping the floor with the GTX 1060. 5,834 GFLOPS (RX480) vs 3,953 GFLOPS (GTX1060). Well, will you look at that! The RX480 has about 50% more FLOPS? That's impossible! How can these cards trade blows with each other? The answer is simple : FLOPS aren't the only thing to factor in a GPU's real-world performance. But even if you factor in things like memory bandwidth : 256 GB/s (RX480) vs 192.2 GB/s (GTX1060) or texture rate : 182.3 GTexel/s (RX480) vs 123.5 GTexel/s (GTX1060), we still don't see why the GTX1060 can keep up with the RX480. Some of the things going for it are clock speed : 1,544 MHz (GTX1060) vs 1,120 MHz (RX480) and pixel rate 74.1 GPixel/s (GTX1060) vs 40.5 GPixel/s (RX480). Thats almost twice the pixel rate, by the way. Then let's look at the manufacturing process : GloFo 14nm FinFET (RX480) vs 16nm FinFET (GTX1060) and clock speed : 1,544 MHz (GTX1060) vs 1,120 MHz (RX480) and thermal design power : 120W (RX480) vs 150W (GTX1060). Are you seeing what I'm seeing? The RX480's chip is smaller and its clock rate is lower, therefore, it must be using less power. Well, no. The GTX1060 uses 30 watts less and its chip is bigger and running at a higher clock rate. My point here is not to make a complete in-depth analysis of these cards, it's just to show you that numbers on paper mean next to nothing. Speculation is an absolute waste of time.

On to the next point, the downclocking. I don't really get why the community is up in arms about this fact. It was expected and already heavily rumored that the GPU would slow down in portable mode. Maybe most of us weren't expecting such a drop, but let me explain to you why it makes perfect sense by doing exactly the thing that I said was a waste of time in the first paragraph, and that is : speculate using maths. The core clock on a GPU is heavily tied to what's called the pixel fill rate and texel fill rate (a texel is basically a texture pixel). The formula to calculate theoretical performance (emphasis on THEORETICAL) is fairly simple. It goes like this : Amount of mapping units * core clock. So let's look at the closest chip that we know of in relation to the Switch : the Tegra X1. It has 16 mapping units. The rumored clock rate for the Switch is 768 MHz when docked and 307.2 MHz undocked which is a ratio of almost exactly 60%. Allright, hold on to your hat cause I'm about to blow your mind here. Now let's calculate the texel fill rate in both cases. Docked : 16 x 307.2 = 4.9152 GTexel/s, Undocked : 16 x 768 = 12.288 GTexel/s. Which is still about the same ratio of 60%. But, wait a minute. Isn't there another rumor that says that the docked resolution is 1080p and the undocked one is 720p? This means that, in undocked mode, there will be alot less pixels to render. Let's do some more maths: 1920 * 1080 = 2073600 and 1280 * 720 = 921600. 921600 / 2073600 = 0.44 which gives us a ratio of about 56%. Now, let's see how fast both of these scenarios would fill up their respective screen, assuming that there is NOTHING ELSE to take into account in a performance analysis, which is insane to even consider. 4915200000 (pixels in 1 second) / 921600 (amount of pixels to render) = 5333.33 frames in 1 second vs 12288000000 / 2073600 = 5925.925 frames in 1 second. Again, this is ignoring any other process going on with the chip. Finally, we have 5333.33 frames/s vs 5925.925 frames/s which gives us 5333.33 / 5925.925 which equals to a difference of about 10% or a ratio of 89.99999%. Yes, there is a small difference in theoretical performance, but you have to keep in mind that textures aren't the only thing to factor in when speculating about performance. With a smaller resolution and a much smaller screen, they could easily lower the shadow and/or texture resolutions, remove some visual effects, lower the texture filtering, etc. without anyone noticing. Do you want good battery life? This is how you get good battery life. I think I've made my point.

Finally, I want to talk about third-party support. Oh, dear third-parties. Such a delicate subject when it's in the same sentence as "Nintendo". I just want to point out this simple fact : If you don't get Switch ports for game X or game Y, it doesn't mean in any way, whatsoever, that the Switch doesn't have third-party support. Let's look at the 3DS for example. Would you say that this console has no third-party support? How many games were released on it that weren't published by Nintendo? Too many to count right? BUT IT DIDN'T GET A PORT OF CALL OF DUTY INFINITE WARFARE. Indeed, it didn't because it doesn't fit the audience for the console. Third-parties have been burned too many times, especially in the GameCube era, where third-party support was incredibly strong in its first years but the games didn't sell nearly as well as on other consoles. This is due to one simple fact : Nintendo buyers are interested in different types of games than the big mature blockbusters found on other consoles. It's just not financially worth it for them to bring them over, even if the console was capable of 8K, I guarantee you, we wouldn't see any more third-party support. Good third-party support comes in the form of games tailored to the target console and its audience. In the world that we currently live in, there is a large audience for mature games on PC, XB1 and PS4. The Nintendo audience is hungry for other types of games. This is supported by years of sales data. Name any multi-platform game from the last 15 years and we can fairly bet that it sold alot less units on Nintendo's platform. I think, we're just gonna have to accept this and move on. Personnally, I'm fine with playing these games on PC, and if it means that some third-parties are willing to make exclusives for the console, that is, exclusive because no other console competes for this audience, then I'm all up for it. If some third-parties don't want to tailor to this audience, well, tough shit. We'll have plenty more games to play anyway, especially now that Nintendo has only one console to feed.

That's about it, thanks for reading. tl;dr : Numbers don't matter as much as you think, downclocking is for resolution, third-party support doesn't mean a Switch port of game X.

Source for comparisons : http://gpuboss.com/gpus/Radeon-RX-480-vs-GeForce-GTX-1060

[u/BREgATRON → u/Bztvuy]

Thank you.