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[eurogamer.net] Nintendo Switch CPU and GPU clock speeds revealed still rumours I think, GPU 2.5x as fast when docked eurogamer.net news SupremeAC
[kotaku.com] Crytek Closes Five Studios After Rough Year The only two studios they will have are in Frankfurt and Kiev. kotaku.com news Nintyfan17
[venturebeat.com] Ecco the Dolphin creator settles lawsuit with Sega possibly paving way for series' rebirth venturebeat.com gamingeek
[nintendo.co.jp] Dragonquest XI confirmed for Switch nintendo.co.jp gamingeek
[gonintendo.com] This week's European downloads - December 22 (Shantae, Back to Bed, many sales and more) gonintendo.com gamingeek
[animenewsnetwork.com] Japan - Third Yo-Kai Watch film beats Rogue One May the farce be with you animenewsnetwork.com gamingeek
[vg247.com] Nier Automata hands-on: weird, slick and with the potential to be one of 2017’s best vg247.com gamingeek
[twitter.com] Switch's resolution not likely 1080 to 720 but WQHD to 1080 "VR just for patent purpose not likely to be used" says WSJ tweeter twitter.com gamingeek
[gamesindustry.biz] Ubisoft: “The Guillemots are critical to our success” "Other birds, not so much" gamesindustry.biz gamingeek
[nintendolife.com] ​Pachter: Switch is the Easiest of the Big Three to Develop For He has been told by devs nintendolife.com gamingeek
[gamasutra.com] How the FIFA franchise nearly never happened The world could have been a better place gamasutra.com gamingeek
[eurogamer.net] Gravity Rush 2 demo out tonight eurogamer.net gamingeek
[mcvuk.com] Bianna Wu plans to run for congress Plans to Wu voters mcvuk.com gamingeek
[neogaf.com] Unreal Engine 4 graphic presets for Switch surface And GAF seems positive neogaf.com gamingeek
[4gamer.net] Japan - 3DS hardware sales surpass PS2 Yatta? 4gamer.net gamingeek
[gamesindustry.biz] VR killer app, Switch top games industry's 2017 wish list Red Dead 2 gamesindustry.biz gamingeek
[venturebeat.com] Nintendo's search volume now three times that of Playstation Thanks to Switch, NES Classic Edition, Super Mario Run venturebeat.com gamingeek
[nintendolife.com] The Switch 'Power' Debate is Likely Missing the Point nintendolife.com editorial gamingeek
[nianticlabs.com] Pokemon GO - Holiday event detailed nianticlabs.com gamingeek
A look at the cancelled open-world Flash Wii game If you flash a wii, the cops arrest you youtu.be gamingeek
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Mon, 19 Dec 2016 00:11:11
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Wtf @ FFV

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Mon, 19 Dec 2016 01:14:25
+1

LOL Yeah that's pretty much FFXV in a nutshell. All the others sound about right too. Kinda want to play them all again just to make sure.

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Mon, 19 Dec 2016 01:35:05
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Kind of makes me want to revisit 3. Except FF3 sucks ass. I've never been able to get more than 3 or 4 hours into any version of it.
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Mon, 19 Dec 2016 07:39:30
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robio said:

Well this is kind of interesting. It doesn't appear a new console is in my future, but my daughter decided to throw down and got me a Raspberry Pi 3 starter kit. I'm going to be very curious to see if I can get this thing to work, or if its going to be something that I mess with, fail at, and give up on after a week.

How cool. Yeah I've had those "I'm going to master robotics!" moments where I have ordered books and parts etc... and then gone, "This shit is hard".

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Mon, 19 Dec 2016 12:12:42
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aspro said:

How cool. Yeah I've had those "I'm going to master robotics!" moments where I have ordered books and parts etc... and then gone, "This shit is hard".


I have read through a number of tutorials, and I think I can handle the basics of it. The more advanced tasks for optimizing individual games for the more advanced emulators that it can run will probably be too much for me, but you never know. Baby steps.
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Mon, 19 Dec 2016 13:01:01
+1
aspro said:
robio said:

Well this is kind of interesting. It doesn't appear a new console is in my future, but my daughter decided to throw down and got me a Raspberry Pi 3 starter kit. I'm going to be very curious to see if I can get this thing to work, or if its going to be something that I mess with, fail at, and give up on after a week.

How cool. Yeah I've had those "I'm going to master robotics!" moments where I have ordered books and parts etc... and then gone, "This shit is hard".

One of my good friends works for a robotics company where they do jobs for the military and whatnot. Playing with drones all day. He's the biggest goofball I know...you would never expect him to be good at this shit. But he's had the job for years and loves it.

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Mon, 19 Dec 2016 14:29:00
+1

So, Switch specs then.  CPU clock speed similar to that of the WiiU, with switch having 4 cores and WiiU 3.  GPU is faster than that of the WiiU when docked (about 770Mhz vs 550-ish), but considerably slower when on battery (about 300Mhz).  All in all we'll be lucky to get parity between both versions of BotW.  Someone calculated that this equates to 157Gflops when on the go, which is shy of the WiiU's 176, if I recall correctly.

Can't say I'm too surprised, although I was hoping for something more on par with the Xbone.

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Mon, 19 Dec 2016 14:57:50
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Can't say that I'm all that surprised by those rumoured specs for the Switch.

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Mon, 19 Dec 2016 18:04:55
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Don't believe everything you read in that DF article. They are mixing what they know with pure speculation based on other peoples dubious leaks. The twitter leak is months old and contested on Gaf. The venture beat story has tons of inconsistencies that GAF has pored through. What we need to know is the fabrication node. Maxwell @ 16nm is essentially Pascal and it's essentially has the same benefits. We, on Gaf have speculated that it will be between 500gflops which is the stock X1 or something in between. The venture beat story said they expected it to be 1 teraflop which is way above what anyone expected. It's also no surprise it would be down locked in portable mode. How else is it going to have a decent battery? I personally expect it to be around 500 gflops which is still 3.5x above Wii U. We also know from devs that the CPU is better than ps4 and xb1, but it only has a small number of shader cores. You have to be realistic when you look at the size of the device, its smaller than the Wii u gamepad and the Wii u console itself is like 5x bigger than switch.

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Mon, 19 Dec 2016 21:35:10
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Tue, 20 Dec 2016 06:12:02
+1
Switch specs are irrelevant. It's not ob par with any other machines so screw the specs. Bring out a decent amount of games for the damn thing.

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Tue, 20 Dec 2016 11:25:16
+1

Here's an easier to understand description of Thraktors post I linked earlier:

http://m.neogaf.com/showpost.php?p=226873407

Originally Posted by Hydrargyrus

Two questions:


- What are those 2/3/4 SM that everyone seems to be talking to?


- And, what about the RAM campared with PS4?, could it be a bottleneck too?

Answer: THE SMs are computational units on the chip of the Switch. The standard tegra x1 has 2 SMs, but Thraktor has theorised that, since the system wouldn't need an active fan in portable mode at this clock speed (which it seems to have), there must be more going on on the chip. His thought were that the system might have extra SMs, since they would give a more power efficient methode of increasing the graphical process (basically, more SMs at lower clock speed is mor efficient than few er SMs at higher clock speed). If the system has 3 SMs, the FLOP rate would increase by 50% (or be multiplied by 1.5), and if it has 4 SMs, the FLOP rate will double.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A lot of the DF article is saying if the leaked specs are right, if the venturebeat story is right and then intepreting things from there. When both those stories are riddled with holes, especially since Venturebeat say they are expecting 1 teraflop from Switch which is wildly higher than anyone expected. The clockspeeds which DF say they do have accurate info on would mean Switch would be nowhere near 1terflop and nowhere near a stock tegra X1 either.

The problem is that DF said they do not have info on the number of shader cores or the SM units and that there are weird bizaare inconsistencies with how it seems to be designed. Which seem very strange as it would be like ordering a bunch of X1s and then ordering that they be gutted and made even worse.

A lot of people have worked out that at the clock speeds given in the docs, it would not need to be actively cooled. In the google tablet which uses stock X1s - that is thinner than the Switch it runs at much higher clocks and still doesn't need active cooling. So it makes no sense that the Switch would have a fan in portable mode and makes even less sense that it would need a fan while docked either - given these clockspeeds.  

What Thraktor is saying is that they may have put in additional SMs which would result in a larger GPU but one where you wouldn't need higher (more heat prone) clocks and still get a good flop output from it.

If that isn't the case, you still have a system in portable mode that is more powerful than wii u and will look better with more modern features and a 720p screen. Then it will be 250% better when docked.  

They've downclocked it by 60% in portable mode which is huge, in the documents it says that those are the final specs "available at launch" so I think they will ease those restrictions at a later date which has happened with several systems like the XB1 when it ditched Kinect, with the 3DS and Vita too.  

Different power profiles like laptops would be good. Still, superficially if we were to take DFs article at face value the specs are lower than even the stock TX1, which doesn't make much sense.

But we don't know the price yet, what if it's $199?

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Tue, 20 Dec 2016 11:30:08
+1

Also, devs have known about and have been working on Switch games for months now and there hasn't been a single peep of disatisfaction at its specs.

The insiders and devs on GAF have indicated the opposite in fact and said that any game running on XB1 and PS4 would have no problem running on Switch. And that the majority of developers they've talked too are possitive on the system. How is that possible if the system is throttled so much in clockspeeds?

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Tue, 20 Dec 2016 13:41:47
+1

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Wed, 21 Dec 2016 08:42:43
edgecrusher said:
aspro said:
robio said:

Well this is kind of interesting. It doesn't appear a new console is in my future, but my daughter decided to throw down and got me a Raspberry Pi 3 starter kit. I'm going to be very curious to see if I can get this thing to work, or if its going to be something that I mess with, fail at, and give up on after a week.

How cool. Yeah I've had those "I'm going to master robotics!" moments where I have ordered books and parts etc... and then gone, "This shit is hard".

One of my good friends works for a robotics company where they do jobs for the military and whatnot. Playing with drones all day. He's the biggest goofball I know...you would never expect him to be good at this shit. But he's had the job for years and loves it.

It's always the way though. hey free up enough of their mind on that kind of stuff that in their off time they are beer-bonging etc...

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Wed, 21 Dec 2016 08:44:58
SupremeAC said:

So, Switch specs then.  CPU clock speed similar to that of the WiiU, with switch having 4 cores and WiiU 3.  GPU is faster than that of the WiiU when docked (about 770Mhz vs 550-ish), but considerably slower when on battery (about 300Mhz).  All in all we'll be lucky to get parity between both versions of BotW.  Someone calculated that this equates to 157Gflops when on the go, which is shy of the WiiU's 176, if I recall correctly.

Can't say I'm too surprised, although I was hoping for something more on par with the Xbone.

I was at least expecting XB1 equity, but that thing is a big box with a big fan, and this is a tablet, so not too surprising. Keeping this thing cool and charged is a major issue and both of those things are linked with power.

It does not contribute to my buying decision, I am going to pre-order the fuck out of it, but it will liekly hurt picking up nontendos. (Trademark).

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Wed, 21 Dec 2016 08:47:43
edgecrusher said:
Switch specs are irrelevant. It's not ob par with any other machines so screw the specs. Bring out a decent amount of games for the damn thing.

gamingeek said:

Also, devs have known about and have been working on Switch games for months now and there hasn't been a single peep of disatisfaction at its specs.

The insiders and devs on GAF have indicated the opposite in fact and said that any game running on XB1 and PS4 would have no problem running on Switch. And that the majority of developers they've talked too are possitive on the system. How is that possible if the system is throttled so much in clockspeeds?

It is not the devs we have to worry about it is the publishers and their built in bias (albeit based on exp) that "nintendo is underpowered, too hard to port, wait and see for the install base".  The actual coders are always going to be passionate about extracting the most power from any config.

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Wed, 21 Dec 2016 11:15:55

For the people following the story, we expected it to be 3.5x Wii U power before EGs article which is equal to a normal Tegra X1. That is around half the power of the XB1, but Nvidia flops are better etc so in reality a bit more than half power.

With the clocks EG has stated it's still 2.5x Wii U when it's docked.

People are going nuts because when undocked it runs 60% slower - no doubt for a longer battery life and less heat, but it's still more powerful than Wii U when in portable form. Think about that, XCX on the go? And has a better screen than the U pad screen. I personally expect them to ease this 60% restriction at some point and allow the system to draw more power/heat in portable form at some point.

Venturebeat is saying that it will be around 1 teraflop, I think XB1 is 1.2 teraflops - their claim only works if it's a Jetson TX1 and makes no sense given EGs clock claims................unless as Thraktor said, they are going to throw in another compute unit which can raise the systems graphical capabilities without drawing too much power and heat. He says that adding a single extra compute unit would do that. But that would make for a larger, more expensive GPU.

If we were to take EGs report at face value, it makes no sense. That would mean Nintendo gutted an X1, made it worse. Reworked it to be worse than what was already there. And then the fans make no sense too as it wouldn't need active cooling as the X1 fully clocked already exists in other devices and does not require active cooling in even thinner devices.

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Wed, 21 Dec 2016 11:27:35
aspro said:

It is not the devs we have to worry about it is the publishers and their built in bias (albeit based on exp) that "nintendo is underpowered, too hard to port, wait and see for the install base".  The actual coders are always going to be passionate about extracting the most power from any config.

It is regarding commercial numbers, but no, all developers are not interested in squeezing the best from any system. We saw with Wii and Wii U people shitting on the hardware very publicly. With Switch it supports all the current main engines they are in the Vulkan group too and it is reportedly very easy to develop for.

With EA, they probably listened to the developers of their main engine - Frostbite - who thought they couldn't make it work on U. (But somehow it would on mobile lol)

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Wed, 21 Dec 2016 12:42:25

I guess we'll just have to wait and see when the units are out in the wild.  But I do enjoy reading about it all.

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