Nintendo Switch Worth It?

[Mira Yurizaki]

53 minutes ago, rrubberr said:

The issue started when they started this whole "too cool for consoles" BS. The GameCube was great, then instead of releasing another serious console, they started doing motion controls and the Wii U. Where the gamecube was directly competitive to the PS2 and Dreamcast, the Wii and Wii U were nowhere near the level of competing with anything; Nintendo wrongly assumed that gimmicky trash motion controls would make up for a lack of effort, and still hasn't learned their lesson.

What does this have to do with "subpar hardware"?

[skywake]

14 hours ago, M.Yurizaki said:

One might say the Tegra X2, but considering it has Denver in it, which is an odd beast, Nintendo probably didn't want it because you can't exactly guarantee consistent performance with Denver. It has to "learn" and optimize, then you may get good performance.  That or the X2 wasn't available for development by the time Nintendo wanted to freeze the hardware configuration. I don't know what other high-performance SoCs were readily available at the time other than Apple's (good luck getting it) or Samsung's.

The question is whether or not that'd actually be better for running games. In terms of raw GPU performance the Switch's SoC sits somewhere between an iPhone 7 and Galaxy S8. It underclocks when it's undocked to be quite a bit slower but I think its fair to say that a phone would underclock if you hammered it's GPU also. But it's also well under half the price of those devices off-contract...

 

For a portable device at that price it's actually pretty impressive how capable it is. If anyone was going to copy what the Switch is doing they'd almost surely have to also use a Tegra chip. Maybe in a few years from now they can get a bit more horsepower out of it. But then again, maybe in a few years from now Nintendo releases a Switch Pro with that better SoC.

[GoodBytes]

16 minutes ago, skywake said:

The question is whether or not that'd actually be better for running games. In terms of raw GPU performance the Switch's SoC sits somewhere between an iPhone 7 and Galaxy S8. It underclocks when it's undocked to be quite a bit slower but I think its fair to say that a phone would underclock if you hammered it's GPU also. But it's also well under half the price of those devices off-contract...

 

For a portable device at that price it's actually pretty impressive how capable it is. If anyone was going to copy what the Switch is doing they'd almost surely have to also use a Tegra chip. Maybe in a few years from now they can get a bit more horsepower out of it. But then again, maybe in a few years from now Nintendo releases a Switch Pro with that better SoC.

Not to mention that the Nvidia Tegra has full OpenGL with Vulkan (and technically DirectX) support, and no subset/mobile version of them. This is thanks to Nvidia expertise in the field in both hardware and drivers to allow this to be possible.