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Nintendo Switch's iGPU: Maxwell Nerfed Edition
- rldjbpin 3y agovery interesting to compare the custom hardware approaches provided by amd and nvidia. while unaware on exact reasons why nintendo went with nvidia, they ended with some legacy hand-me-downs instead of proper custom hardware to suit their needs. regardless, it is a good reminder of how the current hardware landscape allows developers to be lax with supporting limited specs by default. it is refreshing to see some nudges made in the pc gaming space thanks to steam deck and its similar hardware approach.
- yalok 3y agoOne note re this conclusion: > If developers can deliver playable experiences on the Switch, they likely can do so with a HD 530 too. The screen size (resolution) of Switch is very small, and that’s why Switch GPU can produce decently looking games there. Intel GPUs used on larger screens need a few times faster performance to achieve comparable visual quality.
- kyriakos 3y agoFirst party switch games look decent even when docked on TVs (output is still lower resolution). They don't compare to PS5 or XSX graphics fidelity but they are still beautiful and playable.
- highwaylights 3y agoThis is due to a stylistic choice that Nintendo makes - they don’t care about photorealism at all as a design goal. Almost every other game is measured by the yardstick of how “realistic” the games artwork looks when playing, which means those types of games are forever craving more resources and graphics compute as it becomes available. Nintendo uses bright colours, cartoon-like designs and sparse environments that require an order of magnitude less compute per frame but still look great. You can see this on a Switch if you play a game of Mario Kart 8 or Splatoon 3 then immediately launch a multi-platform game like Fortnite or Apex Legends that isn’t designing for limited resources. The difference is completely night and day. As it happens, both of the latest Zelda games are IMHO the most beautiful open worlds created on any platform - likely because not focusing on photorealism allows for more freedom with the artwork itself.
- kyriakos 3y agoSince you mention Zelda, I have to add that Zelda at this point plays better (higher res and frame rate) on emulators than on the platform it was made for because of its hardware limitations.
- highwaylights 3y agoIt has a higher frame rate and resolution, but it doesn’t necessarily play “better”, depending on how you view the importance of the native controllers etc. That said, it speaks more to the point of designing for something other than reality simulation. If other games focused less on looking “real” they’d likely see vastly better performance on normal hardware.
- Nexxxeh 3y ago>it doesn’t necessarily play “better”, depending on how you view the importance of the native controllers etc. You can have the same graphics, same controllers, just better performance, if you so desire. You can play with Joycons, or when playing with other controllers (like an Xbox controller), you can have the UI changed to match. I used a 360 controller and left the UI stock. And you can just turn off Switch-specific quality drops that are used to improve performance on the Switch hardware (at least one of which actually drops performance in emulation, see "LOD Improvement" mod), and/or use better quality emulated versions for an experience that is effectively a theoretical "Switch Pro". I think in this specific instance, better isn't really that subjective.
- highwaylights 3y agoGet any funny looks on the train with that setup?
- Nexxxeh 3y agoI get funny looks without it, so I probably would.
- mort96 3y agoRegarding this: Breath of the Wild runs at 60 FPS (ish) when in handheld mode, but drops to 30 FPS when docked. This is regardless of resolution. You can set the resolution to 480p in docked mode and it'll still run at 30 FPS. Made the game significantly less playable to me, the large panning camera moves on a big screen look absolutely terrible to me at 30 FPS.
- darkteflon 3y agoBotW targets 30 FPS in both docked and handheld mode and regularly drops frames in both - perhaps it’s just more noticeable on the big screen. There’s also no support on either the internal panel or HDMI-out for VRR (not that it would be helpful at sub-30 FPS anyway).
- mort96 3y agoOh wow, I could've sworn it ran at 60 FPS in hand-held mode. But all sources I can find online agree with you that it always targets 30 FPS. I wanna do my own testing just to be completely sure, but assuming literally everyone else is correct, it really does speak to how much more noticeable low FPS is on larger screens.
- HellDunkel 3y agoYou probably want to have a look at your tv settings and turn off the frame interpolation.
- beebeepka 3y agoTears of the kingdom going all the way down to 10 fps is hardly playable. Even movies - a completely passive experience - suck at that frame rate
- HellDunkel 3y agoThat almost never happens if you don’t do anything superspecial such as building huge contraptions.
- herpdyderp 3y agoAll I have to do is look around in an area with several things going on and it happens.
- pseudosavant 3y agoThat, and a PC is an incredibly inefficient gaming machine. Developers squeeze more out of consoles than PCs. An RTX 4090 has 5x the TFLOPS of an Xbox Series X but maybe it's twice as good on a cross platform Windows/Xbox game.
- ferongr 3y agoNah, with equivalent graphical settings and resolution, the PC would manage at least 3 times the framerate. Unsteady 30FPS with terrible frame pacing is nothing that consoles can brag about.
- dangus 3y agoSomething to keep in mind is that modern consoles do deliver many games in 60fps (and some in 120fps), while many PC gamers are targeting even higher frame rates that have diminishing returns and possibly aren’t even compatible with living room TVs that rarely exceed 60Hz and never (to my knowledge) exceed 120Hz. When it comes to the typical 1080p resolution target, it’s really easy to hit 60FPS with very mediocre hardware in most current AAA games without sacrificing much if any visual fidelity. Owning a PC might give you the ability to bump the resolution or turn on inefficient enhancements like ray tracing, but someone sitting on a couch playing on a 60Hz $350 Costco TV isn’t going to experience a difference. As an example, with the Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty benchmark, you’ll hit 60FPS average at 1080p Ultra settings (ray tracing off) with previous-generation mid-range hardware like the RTX 3060 or RX 6600. And of course this is without doing a single bit of console-specific optimization. Shooter and esports examples like Call of Duty and Overwatch 2 are designed to be frame rate optimized and easily deliver a 120fps experience on modern consoles. What consoles can do beautifully is give you a solid 75-100% of the “graphical fidelity to the casual observer” while being far weaker than a more expensive PC. The console market isn’t really like the early 2000s where a crunchy 30fps was a more common expectation.
- opan 3y agoThe Switch specifically still runs many games at 30fps that were 60 on other consoles, such as Nier Automata.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kevingadd 3y agoThe Switch also has unified memory, which is a tremendous boost to performance for certain types of gaming workloads. The same doesn't apply to PC even if you're using a desktop iGPU, because the memory model is different.
- em500 3y agoThe article shows that Intel and AMD's desktop iGPUs have higher bandwidth and lower latency than the Switch's X1.
- kevingadd 3y agoUnified Memory is not about bandwidth or latency. On a desktop PC, you have CPU and GPU side buffers with different addresses that may or may not map to the same physical memory, and the APIs require you to perform mapping/unmapping operations or perform explicit uploads and downloads. On target with unified memory, it is all one address space, the data is just where you put it. There are not split CPU and GPU memory modules. (For some consoles there are different categories of memory, usually based on traits like write combining, but it's all one unified address space). Even now with Vulkan, the experience of programming for a unified memory console is very different. A desktop PC driver can, ideally, optimize out many of your upload/download/map/unmap operations. With unified memory, they simply don't exist.
- _ph_ 3y agoAnd it hast to be noted that the Apple Silicon has also a unified memory architecture. It should allow for some interesting gaming performance if any developer tries to fully optimize for it.
- kimixa 3y agoModern GPUs allow mapping memory through PCIe, so you can treat memory as the same. Resize-able BAR effectively allows the same the other way, where all the GPU vram can be mapped into the CPU. The issue is that suddenly accessing an address can have orders of magnitude lower bandwidth and higher latency, if it is resident on the far memory bus. So for performance reasons you still really need to treat them differently.
- kaliqt 3y agoFSR, XeSS, and DLSS negate this issue entirely actually.
- kevingadd 3y agoKeep in mind that these scalers need additional buffers and video memory to operate properly, which can in turn lower your framerate and increase the game's resource usage. So they're not a free lunch, and some games simply can't generate the buffers necessary for these algorithms to work. See this DLSS diagram from nvidia for example: https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/geforce/news/nvidia-dlss-2-0/nvidia-dlss-2-0-architecture-850px.jpg https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/geforce/n...
- nullindividual 3y agoWhich games run slower or have DLSS etc support that for some reason cannot “generate the buffers” for it to work?
- Dylan16807 3y agoHow many buffers? If you hang on to 10 frames of RGB plus motion vectors at 1080p, and have 4 4K buffers where you're messing with output, that's 6MB * 2 * 10 + 25MB * 4 = 220MB of video memory. That's barely anything. And that's an extra-high estimate of the resolutions that would be involved in a switch game.
- shaggie76 3y agoAs a Switch game developer I'd murder my grandmother to save 220MB of memory.
- Dylan16807 3y agoOn a switch, of course! But we're talking about a computer with several extra gigs lying around running the same game. And specifically that number is for 4K output; anything less and you're under 100MB.
- jeroenhd 3y agoPeople hook up their Switch to their 4k TVs all the time. Whatever upscaling trick the Switch can use to get acceptable graphics the Switch can use. Perhaps Intel's 2015 iGPU (the one tested here) isn't good enough to render games I comparable quality at 1080p, but after eight years Intel has made some advancements too. Integrated graphics should be more than enough these days, but very few people bother to optimise for them the way they do for the Switch. It makes sense, in a way; you can't tell Switch owners their mid tier GPU us insufficient, but in the PC world you're expected to buy a dedicated GPU if you want to play anything more complex than Candy Crush. Perhaps with Intel entering the dedicated GPU market, we'll see more games optimised for Intel, so integrated GPUs can run games better.
- msh 3y agoIntegrated amd gpu's have always gamed decently.
- pixelatedindex 3y agoI think it has got something to do with how easy it is to render Switch games. Steam Deck that uses AMD GPUs have to contend with rendering a much wider array of games, and they don’t have as much control of games as Nintendo does.
- baq 3y agoI bet if Switch games were made exclusively targeting Skylake iGPU they’d run as well or better than on the Switch with its gimped Tegra.
- bitwize 3y agoIt's an upscaling trick of the TV. The Switch pushes out 720p max.
- msk-lywenn 3y ago1080p max. Source: I released pawarumi at that resolution on it.
- angra_mainyu 3y agoDon't think that's it, it still looks fantastic when docked.
- ladyanita22 3y agoI wonder how would that compare to the HD520 in laptops. I have several laptops running that GPU, and AFAIK the HD620 was a small revision of the HD520, so all in all, not much of a change.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y agoThat's not entirely true. I have 1080p screens abd it's still noticeable the downgrade. Even ori and the blind forest (2d+3d) looks way worse than my pc
- toasted-subs 3y agoAnyone els3 remember the nerf or nothing ads. Maybe nothing is the way to go.
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- porkbeer 3y agoThe SteamDeck is a better, cheaper, switch.
- kennyloginz 3y agoWhere are you from? The steam deck is more expensive than the switch everywhere I have seen.