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How much more powerful is the Switch vs Wii U?
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FearlessBelgian
Member
Wrong.
Jaded Alyx
Member
Stop saying something when you dont know what you say ...
Please follow your own advice next time.
frankie_baby
Member
It had slow ram but also 35mb of edram
Gotdatmoney
Member
The first article is wrong. The second one is a gamefaqs article. The WiiU was 176Gflops.
It's not common knowledge but it was not 352Gflops. That is flat out false.
Sure flops isn't the whole story but fp16 can't be used for every type effect or code and the CPU is still about half of what you get in an X1 or PS4. I would not feel comfortable saying the system is 2/3 an Xbone and I am pretty optimistic about the system.
Holy shit are they actually auto-generating prose from tabular specs for SEO?
To be fair Pascall is just a refresh/die shrink of Maxwell
Pascall wasn't even on the roadmap
ThisIsMyDogKyle
Banned
first of all it's very common knowledge that the Wii U is 176 GLOPS, secondly that's a GameFAQs post... lol. thirdly even if we were to take that GameFAQs post seriously (lol) it references an article that came out in December, 4 months before the Switch came out and was largely speculation, fourthly both Zelda and MK8 run better on Switch handheld mode than Wii U, if the Switch was largely less powerful that wouldn't happen, fifthly, it's also known that Nintendo unlocked a second faster clock rate for the Switch in handheld mode that the article in the GameFAQs post doesn't take into account, and sixthly, the mere fact that the Switch is running on a way newer, more modern, architecture means you can't compare the system flops to flops as even if they looked equal purely based on numbers the Switch would still have way better real world performance.
frankie_baby
Member
Wasnt only referring to fp16, its also a more modern design with better api support so in the right hands at least I'd say its closer to two thirds than one
Skittzo0413
Member
This is a great post, and not only because it's probably the first time I've ever seen the words "fifthly" and "sixthly".
But yeah, that 352GF number is an extremely pervasive misconception, which I think is the main problem with the poster's argument.
MrCunningham
Member
The Wii was esentially one and a half gamecubes duct tapped together. Wii-U is a bit harder to judge... cpu would be like 9 Wii cpu's duct tapped, but it also does have a 10MB L2 cache. The GPU is based on a Radeon HD 45-47xx equivalent, or somthing. Maybe 20 Gamecubes duct tapped together? Going by the fact that Tegra can produce 1TFlops, the Switch could be 106 Gamecubes stuck together? While docked at least...
Jaded Alyx
Member
Too bad this good post is probably going to be ignored by him
For him to come out with such nonsense at this stage, he likely ignores a lot of things anyway.
No wonder I couldn't hold all those bits.
frankie_baby
Member
So its a bit better then?
It is one generation better.
Barkley's Justice
Member
I am going to guess no one knows for sure but 37 page thread nonetheless.
Two thirds of what? It's guesstimates on guesstimates on largely incomparable numbers that mean exactly zero.
The Switch will never in it's lifetime produce visuals comparable to Xbox One, let's just state that flat-out. It will likely not even come close. We are currently seeing what the little tablet can produce and it's certainly not 2/3 of Xbox One.
This was simply a choice Nintendo made and all this endless arguing in circles about it theoretically being this more powerful 'in the right hands' was exactly how people tried to rationalize the Wii-U's power deficit a few years ago.
Nintendo are the 'right hands' and they are squeezing very impressive stuff out of the system. But you guys are over-inflating it's capabilities every chance you get.
TheChewyWaffles
Member
So not much
HoodWinked
Member
wii-u < xbox 360 < switch < ps4
its actually more relevant to determine where it sits compared to other hardware, also there are things that the 360 does better than the switch but overall the switch its more capable
its actually more relevant to determine where it sits compared to other hardware, also there are things that the 360 does better than the switch but overall the switch its more capable
frankie_baby
Member
ThisIsMyDogKyle
Banned
pretty much, if I were to do an educated guess I'd say somewhere around 1.4-1.5 times more powerful than the Wii U when undocked, and 2-2.25 times more powerful than that when docked, so 2.8-3.4 times as powerful as the Wii U docked. Of course this is just a guess based off the performance we've seen thus far.
kOsmikcoffee
Member
It's powerful enough to hold my attention for longer than 2 weeks like the Wii U did.
Jaded Alyx
Member
What does the 360 do better than the Switch?
frankie_baby
Member
Red rings of death
Rushersauce
Banned
Killing itself.
MrCunningham
Member
The Switch should be an easy system to measure, it is basically using a stock Tegra chipset. The RAM and development software Nintendo uses for the machine will add or subtract performance from that. Also docked and undocked modes will also change performance as well.
Skittzo0413
Member
I think the problem with this particular question is that while the Switch should be easy to measure, the Wii U really is not.
Plus we have the caveat of FP16 processing which we have no way of knowing whether or not it has been/is being used in any Switch games so far.
You mean capcom bungling a good opportunity on nintendo platform, most of us can remember them before they threw RE4 and other titles on cube under a bus. I definitely remember their half assed treatment of Wii citing a need for sales when certain cube games had performed better than PS2 titles. Do you mean that situation? Do you mean like most other 3rd party developers never making better looking games than they did on cube when some easily showed otherwise? When julian eggbrecht call out 3rd parties and do nothing it's not really on nintendo platforms for doing what he mentioned I couldn't care less about them bungling any title on another platform. Nintendo owned up to the crap situations they force on every 3d console lacking standaridzation of time, what capcom does now is on them. Considering they don't feel it worth the money or effort I don't really think of what MH could do on switch considering reality will prevent it from ever being developed.
Considering the support that UE2 and UE3 got from nintendo or worse regressed it's quite the achievement considering the console now have enough standardization to take the engine. On Wii we got red steel and switch we have snake pass and others. They didn't require downgrades or massive customization from the devs. You trying to downplay the real accomplisment switch is vs any other nintendo console doesn't change that fact of what's already done in a few months vs entire generations of the Wii platforms. I also don't think it's a gold medal or they are deserving of a cookie for doing their jobs but the fact they did and they haven't fucked devs in the process is quite the step up. Would you prefer nintendo to screwing, neglecting, hoarding or not really helping out devs with tools or a real OS for gaming vs switch. We have seen where that road keeps leading and I'm glad they took their own steps not to be in such a position.
It's a surprise to anyone whose paid attention their porting efforts since N64 yet if you're ignornant or delusional I can see why it wouldn't be. EA notoriously hasn't done good porting on nintendo platforms seeing any change is a good thing and certainly better than the unprecendent partnership crap we heard.
As for crysis here is crysis 3 on the same hardware on android in which gaming performance is shit to put down your garbage comment. What does your shit PC have anything to do with switch in this exact context considering it's literally working and much better than said such shit PC? That's also using not vulkan and is on OS that has been known to kill or sap gaming performance.
Wii or WiiU that's quite a disparity? In any case neither of systems can come as close as switch does to it's competition, certainly not WiiU considering it was made for this generation. Most games on any Wii named platform looked trash cause there rarely was any effort made to exploit them due to a lack of standards .We litearlly have WiiU titles look N64 to DC era based in power despite the R700 chip showed it could handle and do a lot more. Switch undocked is better and more efficient performance than Wii and that's unoptimized titles from nintendo. There's no doubt a undocked well developed title is gonna be a looker for the platform. Shinen already shown what they can do with older stuff vs new We already have better looking up ports from WiiU from nitnendo plus a new fucking mario that shits on anything we have seen them do recently.
If it doesn't impress fair enough, but that's not the same as saying there were no imrpovements or they lackluster and not worth mentioning. Splatoon running with better lighting, better frame pacing and better resolution is something I welcome for a meager upgrade.
When you're cpu starved vulkan is your god, that's just about every console right now and more so for switch. Moving to a light OS also helps them keep a ton of performance for gaming vs using android or their own crap which would eat potential performance in overhead. I'm not arguing it will do more with them. I'm arguing switch them better api, better gpu and decent it will use more of what it has which is what the api has already proved via various well known titles that use it as I mentioned. That isn't magic sauce that's fucking fact as of the last two years.
Again you can say not to support would be stupid but nintendo literally was using an opengl variant and no gaming OS and could've continued to do so. Have you ignored for years that AMD architectures are shit at exploiting opengl even with what devs have done? For evolving they benefit and so do devs be it in general performance or the complex optimization or effects they can achive that opengl or older dx can't do so easily vs low level apis like Mantle, DX11, DX12, and Vulkant. Opengl is shit on amd gpus period no matter it be console or pc. For nintendo to move up is a god send to any dev who decides to properly optimize their game or wants to just get up and running without having to worry about performance issues.
Here's a phoronix article comparing I3/I5 using vulkan and look at that differences.I guess I can be snarky and say well nintendo should do their job except in every generation before they didn't. Now we get a switch with maxwell architecture and vulkan, count me in for the ride. No matter how you slice be it automatic benefits of switching to a more efficient setup or optimizing the switch will offer a lot more than WiiU did to most devs.
Here's a phoronix article comparing all the architectures that are being mentioned and guess what it shows. Flops aren't the only thing that matter. Barring that fact it's impossible to combine the hardware necessary for comparison. I know like others do the R700 Wii GPU at switch undocked clocks would get smashed or outright just fail to do various 1st and 3rd titles parties right now as is or with optimization. That's fact not hyperbole or hypothesis. Comparing WiiU cpu to the tegra arm processor is a joke one of them has decent multi threading as a arm quad core of the current era. The other is ibm customization of 750powerpc of the P3 intel era. You and anyone think's that's 2x or even 4x in terms of real world results should be laughed at in any tech topic. The ipc alone is enough to crap on WiiU cpu. The general fps performance of vulkan on amd gpu vs opengl on amd gpu is a real gain. Considering you get more stable frame pacing I will gladly take the better api vs again nintendo opting to stay in the past. I can't fathom wanting to work with opengl at this point when there is so much better.
My bad I meant vita.
I prefer the motion of my titles to static blur. I also prefer that all my pcs can downsample or light boost my games at high or max at 80-120fps vs what those said HD consoles can do. Switch be it pc or the hd giants is in much better place than previous nintendo console or any handheld we can name.You can talk all you want about PSP or VITA. Switch already has titles that didn't require the games to be chopped up to the same degree for any big name title you can name that was trying to emulate the console they come from. Switch does WIiU better than WiiU and can hang at times with titles that are being made for beefier machines that don't have a small form. You can compare all you like the but benchmarks, actual titles and metrics aren't things you can really argue. Those handhelds didn't even get to 720p switch clearly does it for the most part and longer too. I love my handhelds but the jump we just got is quite legit.
I hope most 3ds devs take the parts of switch they can as a continuation. I will miss the few 3d or DS based experiences I have but to go to what we have is amazing for a mobile platform.
There's no question PS4 as a whole is having a good time. Switch so far is in a better spot than the shakiness of the xbox platform if we are talking about starting point. Saying it's not appealing post launch is garbage, until the drought happens it's doing what it can assuming you can even buy one. Sans Wii switch could easily be the most appealing 3d console nintendo has ever produced based on sales. They would have to screw up the next to years for them to fail at that and it doesn't look like that will happen. When it's done while it won't be PS2 or Wii it will be the 2nd best 3d selling console they have made. I won't say it will be like nes but cube, n64, and snes are going to have lower numbers it keeps going That's quite appealing considering that WiiU next to virtual boy was basically death for nintendo. Only fools would argue that nintendo wants to be in MS position they are quite comfy on 3ds and switch vs XB1 and Soon to be XBX. Again you can check stats but some switch ports are performing better than steam versions for titles that have no console equivalents. That's quite appealing, not to you but for publishers who deal in certain titles it's definitely is.
lwilliams3
Member
We have enough info to get a good estimation, but some posters are being silly.
Here is a rough summary:
CPU: Over 3x Wii U.
RAM: 3.25x the quantity of the Wii U
GPU: Over 1.5x-2x (undocked), 3x-4x (docked)*
Architecture: 2008 vs 2014/2015 tech
*Not including fp16.
MrCunningham
Member
Yeah, there is that too. Wii U would be a bit hard to measure performance. Plus, I guess FP16 is something that was not part of the original Tegra arcitechture, Nvidia added that to the Switch.
The_Intruder
Member
.We have enough info to get a good estimation, but some posters are being silly.
Here is a rough summary:
CPU: Over 3x Wii U.
RAM: 3.25x the quantity of the Wii U
GPU: Over 1.5x-2x (undocked), 3x-4x (docked)*
Architecture: 2008 vs 2014/2015 tech
*Not including fp16.
MK8 vs. MK8DX: 720p60FPS vs 1080p60FPS -That's looking like twice as powerful but it's even more:
MK8 vs MK8DX SPLITSCREEN 2 Player: 720p@30FPS vs. 1080p@60FPS: In this scenario we have the Switch performing at four times the power of a WiiU.
In truth the Switch might be roughly 2-3 times as powerful when docked and maybe 1,5-2 times as strong as a WIiU in portable mode -but thanks to the better architecture and much more RAM it might be even further ahead, as seen in MK8DX Splittscreen 2 Player Mode.
MK8 vs MK8DX SPLITSCREEN 2 Player: 720p@30FPS vs. 1080p@60FPS: In this scenario we have the Switch performing at four times the power of a WiiU.
In truth the Switch might be roughly 2-3 times as powerful when docked and maybe 1,5-2 times as strong as a WIiU in portable mode -but thanks to the better architecture and much more RAM it might be even further ahead, as seen in MK8DX Splittscreen 2 Player Mode.
HoodWinked
Member
i wasn't even meaning it as some kind of jab, but people here are just hostile jerks. i meant it in terms of some specific low level cpu instructions that are probably faster on a 3.2ghz powerpc than 1ghz arm but overall throughput being better on switch.
MK8 (wiiu) 2 player splitscreen is 720/60. Unless there's AI then it's 720/59 ish.
frankie_baby
Member
Perhaps possible but i doubt it, the fact you put the wii u behind the 360 though in your line up suggests it was actually a jab
MrCunningham
Member
UE4 dropped PowerPC arcitecture from its codebase which left all gen 7 consoles as well as the Wii-U out in the cold. It did hurt indies and third parties to a degree, and left UE2 and UE3 as the only options from Epic. PPC became less relevant the moment hat Apple switched to x86 for all of their home PCs and laptops. But given that Epic does allow developers to tinker with the UE4 sourcecode, it is not impossible to create a branch of UE4 for the Wii-U. Bloodstained my end up being yhe only Wii-U game to use UE4, if the development group that was hired to port UE4 to the Wii-U are still working on it.
Switching over to ARM did solve ha issue, as ARM is one of he mos supported arcitechtures out there now. I think all the maor and lesser popuar gam enginex support it now.
frankie_baby
Member
Bloodstained was cancelled on wii u, for some bizarre reason they are apparently still going to attempt the vita version
I didn't mention UE4, though those details are very nice to know. My point in mentioning early version of UE is that support was none existent on a official levels and only a few devs made their own customized version with ubisoft being the most noteable.
I like that an engine like UE4 is actually being supported on big level with switch compared to basically a very quirky past the last 2-3 gens. UE made it on dreamcast yet on dolphin/cube architecture none existent in consumer till Wii. Nintendo had that bird demo on WiiU that used it but to see no titles actually get that close gets me as much as not seeing another zelda tech demo realized.
MrCunningham
Member
Ah, OK. I wasn't sure what the status was on that. I guess the team gave up on porting UE4 to PPC because it wasn't worth it? Vita is a different case. It my not be supported by Epic officially, but it dioes use an ARM cpu, which is alo somthing that UE4 supports, just like he Switch. Maybe a Vita port is a much easier possibility?
frankie_baby
Member
No they hadnt even started they just decided to cancel it in favour of a switch version, i cant see the vita version being easier to do, its just too weak
OrangeGrayBlue
Member
I'd also like to know this.
frankie_baby
Member
I'd be pretty sure chinner already knows
FunkyDealer
Banned
I'm no expert, but even I know there's no precise way to compare the two consoles. Sure, you could look at the RAM frequency and GFLOPS, but on-paper numbers only tell half the story.
Just look at the memory:
The Switch has 3.25x the usable amount of RAM for games. The memory pool is twice as fast, but Wii U has a whole 32MB of even faster EDRAM to help it out. Which is the same amount as Microsoft gave the far more powerful Xbox One in ESRAM. Keep in mind the X360 only had 10MB of the same stuff.
And then you gotta somehow factor in that the Switch uses more modern and efficient compression, so that 3.25x increase in capacity and 2x speed, has an even larger effect in practice.
There's also the difference in data-streaming betweent Wii U's optical disc, internal memory and external HDD's vs the NS cartridges, internal memory and SD-Cards.
And this isn't even getting into all the other architectual and driver differences in CPU, GPU, and audio-processing.
Just look at the memory:
The Switch has 3.25x the usable amount of RAM for games. The memory pool is twice as fast, but Wii U has a whole 32MB of even faster EDRAM to help it out. Which is the same amount as Microsoft gave the far more powerful Xbox One in ESRAM. Keep in mind the X360 only had 10MB of the same stuff.
And then you gotta somehow factor in that the Switch uses more modern and efficient compression, so that 3.25x increase in capacity and 2x speed, has an even larger effect in practice.
There's also the difference in data-streaming betweent Wii U's optical disc, internal memory and external HDD's vs the NS cartridges, internal memory and SD-Cards.
And this isn't even getting into all the other architectual and driver differences in CPU, GPU, and audio-processing.
Skittzo0413
Member
It's different levels of precision for floating point variables, precision meaning the maximum amount of digits in the variable I believe. FP32 is called full precision and FP16 is called half precision, and there are some things in games that require the use of FP32 precision but others which could be done simply with FP16 precision. Most consoles are built to handle FP32 precision and even though the code can have FP16 variables, these consoles get no benefit from running that code versus FP32 code- they process the two in the same way.
For a lot of mobile devices including the Switch and also the PS4 Pro the architecture is built to handle either 1 FP32 variable or 2 FP16 variables at a time (I think this is a simplistic way to describe it but it should be fairly accurate), such that it can effectively process FP16 variables twice as fast as FP32 variables.
I'm in no way an expert on this so someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but that's basically how I understood it from reading the various NX speculation threads and some light googling.
MrCunningham
Member
I only quoted your post, because I am on a craptastic Android tablet and it is a pain to selectivly quote the post that you originally commented on. I am out of town and have no access to a PC.
But yeah, Epic didn't really put full support behind the unreal engine on consoles until the PS2 and Xbox OG era with versions of UE1 and UE2. UE3 dominated the 360 (Gears) and PS3, but there were developers with their own branches of these engines. 360, PS3 and the Wii were all PPC cpu based systems. IBM co developed the CPU's for all three machines. But as I mentioned before, Epic dropped PPC from UE4 entirely to remove uneded bloat from the engine. PS4 and Xbox One went for 86x, while Nintendo stuck with PPC for BC reasons.
I guess Epic wanted to clean out the cruft of UE3 for ARM (ios and andoid) support. But other engines like Unity, Cry Engine, game maker and UE3 still supported thw Wii and PPC.