th3sicknness
Member
They got back ops to run on one gig of ram! And they had local co-op mode split between the tablet and tv. Four gigs will be plenty.
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Nintendo Switch Dev Kit Stats Leaked? Cortex A57, 4GB RAM, 32GB Storage, Multi-Touch.
- Thread starter Robert at Zeboyd Games
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4GB is pretty low considering the OS is going to take some of it - it's only double the Wii U while the rest of the specs will be well more than double. Though on the plus side being entirely flash memory means they won't really need to waste memory on caching for handling streaming and large levels, they should be able to load more on the fly.
ShadowFox08
Member
To be fair, if one GB is reserved for the OS, then 3GB will be left and they'll have 3X the amount of RAM for gaming than the Wii U does.
Yeah that's not a great way to look at it. If they still reserve 1GB for the OS, that leaves 3GB for games; triple what's available for Wii U games.
PdotMichael
Banned
4GB of kind of slowish ram will hurt the Switch if the market sees the Switch in the competition with the PS4 and Xbox One.
Selling that mobile mode as deciding factor will be crucial for Nintendo.
Selling that mobile mode as deciding factor will be crucial for Nintendo.
Nintendo definitely revealed how much RAM Wii U had before launch. I remember it being on their site at one point even. Since they removed that, however, I wouldn't count on anything being revealed about Switch. Also since it would be bad to do it from a marketing perspective unless they move away from calling it a console.
ShadowFox08
Member
Speed/type of and bandwidth are going to be huge factors also.
First part titles will be fine, though ports could definitely suffer if multiplat.
Someone brought this up earlier(this thread or the general switch thread)--Nintendo using flash cards will help mitigate RAM issues when it comes to looking for data. Just how much and how would that help exactly again?
Nostremitus
Member
Depends on the bandwidth, but it's highly unlikely that they get the same benefits that old consoles got. The N64 could read directly from the cart as if it were RAM, but neither the DS or 3DS could do this, so the Switch probably can't either. I mean, it's not like the Switch cart is connecting to the motherboard via a proprietary PCIe equivalent like they did in the old days.
It should still be a lot faster than streaming from a disk, though.
So why did Nintendo abandon this? Reading from cart as it were ram seems to be a very good idea.
This is Nintendo's patent from a few months ago. Is this accurate to switch?
http://i.imgur.com/t3BCnp4.png
Lower in FLOPS doesn't necessarily mean slower in actual usage. Architectural efficiencies can make a huge difference and 6+ years of development time is huge in the GPU industry.
KojiKnight
Member
Very very very very very expensive. Those $60 snes games? Depending on the cart and of it had a special chip, you were looking at 20-40 of that price being just the cart cost.
That said, the faster random access reads on these carts is going to be huge compared to blurays.
PdotMichael
Banned
No one loads data from a Blu-Ray anymore.
The use of Game Cards will not compensate for a possible lack of system ram.
The use of Game Cards will not compensate for a possible lack of system ram.
th3sicknness
Member
You do realize that the ps4 and the x1 only have 5 gigs usable for games ??? When compared it isn't going to be dwarfed.
wonderful103
Member
Iirc they're reserving 800mb for the OS
Skittzo0413
Member
Game cards are likely to be quite a bit faster than the hard drives in PS4/XB1, so in that way they could very well make up for some system RAM.
But that wouldn't necessarily work for digital games if the rumors about microSD card support are true, so I agree that I don't think game cards will be the intended solution to getting around RAM/RAM speed.
EDIT:
There was a user here who claimed to know some things that said 3.2 GB for games, although I don't think he was 100% vetted. So take it with a grain of salt.
DaSorcerer7
Member
Second time i've seen this, where did this 800MB for the OS rumor originate from?
Some gaffer insider leaked it.
Cuningas de Häme
Member
How do you know that? Heck, we don't even know the real amount of RAM, 4 is rumoured and 3,2 for games.
One would think that coming up with all these negatives about Nintendo would be exhausting...
Was he the same guy who "confirmed" the specs in the OP? Because i remember some people saying that he was full of shit.
th3sicknness
Member
Didn't Sony change the amount to 8 right before going to production?
PdotMichael
Banned
Any transfer rate and latency advantages the Game Cards could provide over hard disks are rather academic. Devs are forced to take care about how to compensate the best if there is not enough ram avaiable.
Cuningas de Häme;226450606 said:
We know what nVidia is doing with Tegra Pascal. And there just technical limits one can do with LPDDR4 right now.
GhostTrick
Banned
You won't lack of ram for barely 2GB difference when it's obvious you'll hit a wall before because of the lower GPU horse power. That and the better VRAM management with Maxwell and Pascal..
PdotMichael
Banned
The lack of system ram is indeed just another wall like the lower GPU power, yes.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
How are card advantages academic if cards represent the baseline of the system?
Yes, in the order of ~68GB/s on a 128-bit bus.
Less like walls, more like speedbumps. The real barrier (as always) will be how the system and it's software sell.
Skittzo0413
Member
Just out of curiousity why is HBM out of the question*? I think we discussed this like ~20 pages back but is the cost really that prohibitive? Like, do we know if it's something like 2-3x the cost of LPDDR4 or more like 20-30x the cost?
*I don't expect it because everyone constantly says not to but I'm curious about the reasoning.
It's as if these arguments are shot down, but people forget pages later because they can only remember so many pages worth of information.
50GB/s RAM is what Nvidia is using in the Pascal based Parker SoC, which isn't a technical limitation, LPDDR4 can go into the high 60GB/s range. If that's slow then you must also consider XBox One to have slow RAM as well.
th3sicknness
Member
Not sure that is fair considering like the Wii U it has 2 pools of memory (ED / ES Ram). So it isnt as slow as it looks.
Xdrive05
Member
I really like this way of thinking about it. That seems in line with the projected GPU performance compared to the XBO/PS4 as well.
So I wouldn't be surprised if we get fully featured XBO/PS4 ports to Switch which may only run at 600p/720p port/dock. To me that would be more than fine, because you still get to shove that mofo right in your pocket and play a current-gen game in its entirety just at a lesser resolution. That's also a technical marvel in my opinion.
And with any luck the Nvidia compression stuff and dev tools will help ported titles hit 720p as a baseline even in portable mode. I suspect bandwidth could be the real bottleneck, but again the Nvidia tech is built around alleviating those kinds of issues from what I read smart people write about.
The only other major porting concern, I believe, is it seems we will be relying on the game carts for storing the game data. No idea if patches will be applied to those carts, or if you'd have to put them on a microSD or something like that. That's a very asymmetrical way to do patching in 2016, when everyone else is patching over the initial game installation. Assuming that's their solution, I hope it doesn't keep some ports away from the Switch.
tkscz
Member
Besides cost, power. Theoretical low for current HBM is 14.6W from what I found. While LPDDR4 would be 1.02W. HBM would kill batteries faster. Would be nice to have, but there would probably only be 2GBs at best inside the Switch in order to save as much battery as possible.
Even if its 2 - 3x, wouldn't that be prohibitive?
Hero of Legend
Member
Here's a question. Do you think Nintendo could get away with trimming the fat in terms of OS features to use less RAM? I mean I still adore the GC's OS, it's simple, fast, and easy to use. A far better menu than the Wii U's, that's for sure.
Surely some features like screenshot saving can be done with far less than 800MB of RAM dedicated to the OS.
Surely some features like screenshot saving can be done with far less than 800MB of RAM dedicated to the OS.
I'm pretty sure patches/dlc will be saved to system memory. That's how PSP, 3DS and Vita did it, not to mention every console so far. I doubt you'll even store saves on the cards now, Nintendo will want to cut media costs as much as possible to maximize returns on those 16/32GB roms.
Giving back memeory is always a possibility. PS3 did it and so did 3DS early on (going from 64MB to 96MB for devs). I doubt they'll really need to for Switch before it gets an upgraded remodel though.
Skittzo0413
Member
I thought HBM got into far lower power envelopes than that. The 7th slide at this link says 3.3W at 128GB/s bandwidth for HBM, which I think could be clocked lower to suit the Switch's needs. Unless I'm reading that slide wrong which I very well could be.
Edit: Ah that might be for the new LPHBM which isn't available yet?
At manufacturer's prices and at large volume it shouldn't make an enormous difference if it's 2-3x more expensive for one component. I would say it would take the BoM from, say, $175 to $185-190 or something. Completely out of my ass though.
Unfortunately Nintendo is too early for HBM. There are low power, and lower cost, versions of HBM in development, but they won't be on the market for a while. At some point you will see a "LPHBM" memory type though for mobile devices.
Graphics Horse
Member
It was finalised before the January reveal so not exactly right before.
Xdrive05
Member
That sounds reasonable for most applications. But I hope developers can live with that for their big budget, big patch sized games. I know Doom just had a patch that was like 20GB or something on PS4. I don't see that happening on Switch's 32GB system storage without the pitchforks coming out.
And hopefully 32GB doesn't remain the upper limit for game cart sizes for too long. A lot of already existing multiplats would need serious compression to fit on that.
Well, you can always supplant Switch's system memory with a beefy microsd card. Also the premium model is supposedly shipping with more memory so we might see 64/128GB internal for some units.
I'd expect game cards to grow to 64GB if devs demand it. 3DS didn't really expand much (just 2GB to 4GB within the first year) but we know it could have (8GB was rumored to be available). My guess is most devs will manage with 32GB max.
th3sicknness
Member
I would imagine the Switch version is not going to need as much higher resolution textures and other assortments of features that drive the size up. I would expect developers to be able to slim their games down based on the hardware its going to?
The PC version takes up 71 gigs on my computer now.
tkscz
Member
Think it's per 1GB stack. What I looked up was for at least 4GB of HBM
To reiterate once again Tegra uses tile based rendering which just like embedded RAM keeps the majority of rendering inside the GPU, it has a very similar bandwidth saving. That's why I bought up XBox One.
What isn't fair is to compare main RAM bandwidth for a GPU like Tegra directly to main RAM bandwidth in a system that uses standard full scene rendering like PS4 (or XBox One if you're going to include its eSRAM bandwidth but ignore TBR).
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