I think people are failing to realize that the Nintendo Switch
will easily be the best ever graphics on a mobile device.
I want to compare to other mobile devices to get a rough idea of the performance we may see Nintendo squeeze out of the Switch. We can assume that when its docked the Switch will have additional power, cooling, and possible hardware up-scaling to assist in 1080p.
However, I want to compare to mobile devices available now to try to get a real world idea of what we can reasonably expect.
Lets compare to the Vita. A well known portable gaming system. Keep in mind that the PS Vita, released late in 2011, featured a PowerVR 543MP4 which itself was around since 2009.
The PS Vita uses a PowerVR SGX543MP4+ (which is
similar in design and performance to the iPhone 5 GPU), in order to compare to some more modern processors look at the Iphone 5 compared to an Ipad air.
The Ipad air is about 2.5x faster than an Iphone 5.
In context below, lets keep in mind that the
iPad Air, which is 2.5x faster than PS Vita, to the Kepler based K1 Shield Tablet.
Shield tablet uses a Kepler GPU (with 192 CUDA cores)
The shield itself is 2.5x faster than Ipad Air. So the GPU in Shield tablet is more than 6x faster than the Vita GPU (!) in comparison (looking at GFXBench 3.0 Manhattan 1080p Offscreen benchmark data):
Nvidia Shield K1 uses 192 Kepler cores in a tablet-form power envelope. We all know we saw a massive efficiency gain going from Kepler to Maxwell. In addition to that, we have seen Pascal gain further power reductions with the help of the 16nm process and architecture updates.
The X2 is rumored to be 256 Pascal cores. With 25% more cores, vastly improved Pascal cores, and all on a 16nm process; we are looking at an X2 that is atleast as twice as fast as the K1.
Now think about the fact that the Shield Tablet is already 6x more powerful than the Vita, and that the rumored X2-based Switch would probably be at least twice as fast as the Shield,
which has a resolution of 1920x1200p. Look at GTA V running on a shield tablet. It looks excellent and runs well.. Now watch this and imagine a system twice as fast with heavy Nintendo optimizations. Edit: Be sure to select 1080p when you watch the below.
A 256-core Pascal GPU with a possible embedded SRAM for free filtering (both Wii U and 3ds have dedicated SRAM), optimized by Nintendo and with custom APIs from nVidia will be plenty of power for 90% of console gamers out there. The only question in my mind is how easy will it be to develop for. If you consider the fact that its using arm cores and nVidia graphics units then you can also probably assume this will be much easier to develop for any past Nintendo system. People can relax, this system will be great.