Switch Discussion Thread

[Tanooki]

No not entitled at all. I just believe that a company who releases game and intends it for multiple formats, not to blame the consumer for it underperforming when they release it months later due to intended (or not) delays and typically at a higher asking price. The blame there falls on the publisher, but they seem to always jump towards blaming the consumer and punishing that market as a result which seems pretty short sighted and childish. You don't have to call me kid you horses ass. I have a feeling there's the larger here I don't get along with the infection in gaming of left leaning culture here and that gap is widening given the history.


Segata does raise an interesting point about bad decisions and using them to punish buyers too such as ME3 on WiiU coming out when the ME Trilogy came out on the competition also for less money. I forgot about that one and it got people pretty miffed back when that came out, but I guess those were just entitled Nintendo losers bitter their new system didn't bite given the other options. I'm not going to touch that Project Cars excuse though as the terrible hardware couldn't handle it and I know nothing of the kickstarter details. Kickstarters are just a form of gambling, and if you bet on a WiiU release and they still met their 100% funding goal, you're kinda just out of luck on that.

[isiolia]

Even if a company comes out and says that sales just weren't good enough to warrant targeting a platform, I wouldn't necessarily take that as blaming consumers. It's likely more a statement of fact, summing up any number of reasons. The simple rationale of "doing that won't make us money" is simply hard to argue with if customers ask.

Still, most of that I'd place more on Nintendo. The lower the cost to port a game, the more likely it'll be that a publisher will see a return on investment, right? Some Wii U and now Switch issues are coming up due to multiplatform engines being suboptimal (or unavailable, in the case of Wii U). Battle Chasers was delayed due to Unity. Microsoft would turn around and have people help companies optimize games. Nintendo has seemed to be less helpful. Plus high licensing costs, probably fewer system level services to hook into, and so on.

Nintendo's strategy seems to be more one that relies on selling a lot of hardware on their own efforts...to the point that publishers will do whatever they need to in order to get in on that sweet, sweet customer base. When they do Wii U numbers, it just doesn't work as well, and it seems like Nintendo doesn't do much to try and improve things in that respect.

[Segata]

Nintendo is much more friendly and open with developers on Switch. Many devs have come out and said it. The proof is in how Switch is getting so many games from indies and bigger AAA publishers and even AA games like Outlast 1-2 and they look almost identical to the PS4 version(and Outlast runs on UE3 not native to the platform). Capcom told Nintendo to increase the RAM on the Switch and Nintendo listened. Wii U had a lot of issues with hardware and API that Switch doesn't have. So there is some validity to devs backing out of Wii U stuff. Switch isn't as powerful as PS4 no but it's just good enough in not just power but API and a modern chipset it can handle a lot you throw at it with sometimes minimal to moderate optimization that Wii U took far more work. Even the games that may take more work the hardware and API are friendly enough it's not a hassle like Wii U esp with the Wii U CPU. Switch CPU core per core is better than PS4 but PS4 has double the number of cores at 8. The other nice thing is the Switch dev kits cost as much as an Xbox One X where Wii u dev kits could go up to 10,000 bucks.

[marurun]

Segata, where do you get this stuff? I can almost guarantee the Switch’s ARM cores do not have per core performance rivaling the AMD x64 Jaguar cores in the PS4 and XB1. The x86 and x64 ISA chips have always had dominant integer, FP, and vector performance compared to ARM. ARM’s advantage is performance per WATT, not per MHz or per core.

[isiolia]

Relative performance of the Cortex A57s in the Tegra X1 has been brought up on places like Neogaf as well. From what I've seen, that particular assertion really isn't wrong...though it really has more to do with how anemic the Jaguar cores are. Nearly any x86 setup spanks the X1...except, see that Athlon 5150 under it in tests? That's a quad core 1.6Ghz Jaguar CPU.
'course, that is comparing to a higher clocked version than the Switch has, and the X1/PS4 have high bandwidth memory setups that might skew things differently. Even then, I don't think most would argue that the CPUs in the Xbox One or PS4 are really that powerful. They're very skewed towards packing in the most GPU as possible, especially in the Pro/X1.

At the same time, I wouldn't really take it to imply that the Cortex A57 cores are that robust either. There are some fairly powerful ARM setups on the market now - the iPad Pro for instance - but this is just more the case of a low power CPU core from 2015 outdoing one from 2013. Neither are exactly monsters.

[marurun]

Those two benchmarks are only so helpful. When we're talking about common tasks being performed in games, I think you'll find all the various bolt-on SSE and other vector instruction sets on the Jaguar will make a significant difference. It's clear that ARM's A57 core is rather potent for an ARM mobile core, but I think in more robust and real-world scenarios you'll still see AMD's Jaguar core pulling better performance.

[isiolia]

Sure, though ARM has similar instruction sets (NEON) to work with too. Just saying, Jaguar cores are pretty bottom of the barrel for semi-modern x86 performance, so it's really not much of a stretch for something to outdo 'em per clock. The relatively weak CPU performance of the MS and Sony consoles has started to come up, and will likely be an angle for whatever machines come next (since they'll probably be Ryzen based).

[marurun]

So I decided to take this seriously and not just rely on assumptions. The A57 cores in the Switch are indeed slightly more powerful on a clock per clock basis to AMD’s Jaguar cores. However, the Switch has them down-clocked at a low enough rate that the PS4’s Jaguar cores will have higher single-threaded performance, at least based on Geekbench scores. And with twice the cores to boot, the PS4 has a definitive multi core CPU advantage and a mild single core advantage. The Jaguar isn’t quite Atom weak, but it is getting there. But then Nintendo also hamstrung their clock rate.

[dsheinem]

So I decided to take this seriously and not just rely on assumptions. The A57 cores in the Switch are indeed slightly more powerful on a clock per clock basis to AMD’s Jaguar cores. However, the Switch has them down-clocked at a low enough rate that the PS4’s Jaguar cores will have higher single-threaded performance, at least based on Geekbench scores. And with twice the cores to boot, the PS4 has a definitive multi core CPU advantage and a mild single core advantage. The Jaguar isn’t quite Atom weak, but it is getting there. But then Nintendo also hamstrung their clock rate.

Get out of here with your left leaning culture!

[Reprise]

So what's everyone playing at the moment? I was considering picking up Owlboy, but I see a physical version is coming out in May, so I'm going to wait for that. I picked up Outlast instead, since I haven't got around to properly playing that one (I think I had it once courtesy of Playstation Plus, but I never completed it and I'm no longer a PS+ member).

I wonder when we're going to get another Nintendo Direct or big announcement (perhaps not until E3?). It doesn't feel like there's a lot on the horizon for me... I'm looking forward to Dark Souls (remaster/port), Hyrule Warriors (remaster/port), but not sure what else really at the moment.... Metroid Prime probably won't hit until 2019.

Edit: Oh wait, it's exactly one year today since the console launched. They need to do a big announcement today to celebrate!