Is this even a debate? The Wii U was slightly more powerful than the 360 and PS3, and it's been proven that the Switch is far more powerful than the Wii U.
Wii U actually had a worse CPU than PS3/Xbox360. But in the graphics department, Wii U was much better. Though I don't think the Switch is far more powerful than Wii U Zelda BOTW on Wii U run at the same graphical settings as the Switch undocked and when docked only difference was 720p ve 900p on the Switch. I guess you can argue that Zelda BOTW don't take full advantage of the Switch since it was a port but you can also argue that the Switch is easy to port games to and Nintendo would have optimized the hell out of Zelda since it was their launch title.
Lazy Otaku that 30% is also completely relative to maximum performance.. not just theoretical performance. It's my belief.. and really more so proof of the industry that a well made nvidia card will always perform better on a maximum performance than the theoretical yields of amd equivalent cards. Case and point a vega gpu from amd rates at 12 tflops theoretical performance yet a gtx 1080 at only 8 tflops still compared and even outperforms the vega in many games. That's a 66% difference in strength and yet the x1 only sits at 36% power difference from the switch docked. Now there definitely other factors that never quite meet exact standards here but just rather proof that well optimized hardware and software>theoretical performance #s
Cutter Elf That is a very dumb comparison to make. Comparing a port and saying this is the full potential of the Switch. Seriously that game was developed on Wii U architecture for 4 years and then quickly ported over to the Switch ARM architecture in a couple of months for a launch game. Flag ship smartphones blow the Wii U away interns of power so don’t act like it’s impossible. Anyone that uses a launch game let alone a port to justify a consoles Power is a complete utter moron. Look at the first games that came to the Xbox 360 they looked worse than late PS2 games. The Xbox One and PS4 launch games barely looked better than their last generation counterparts.
@Digitalbumpin thats the case with all knowledge smart guy. There's probably not a single piece of known information that exists that one can't find on the internet. Name any fact about any public information and you will be able to find something about it on the internet.
At this point it should be obvious that the switch is more powerful than the 360 and ps3. Either these people are naive or they want the switch to be on par with the old consoles just for the satisfaction of making fun of it!
Talal Who the hell said I was proud of it? I was one of the people who didn't want nintendo to go with the X1 chip and maxwell. If nintendo went with something better; people would be bitching about the price (they bitched at 300 lol)
Rodox2k10 they is the biggest games review channel on RU-vid. So a coarse the publishers gonna pay ign to get better reviews of their games. But it’s the people fault to believe ign’s reviews. Reviews are opinions.
Sadly we live in an age where people look at paper specs and decide power purely off of those. Heaven forbid we spend more than 5 minutes researching things anymore.
@@ancientshiv9837 Lol I read an old forum thread the other day where a bunch of people were adamant that the PSP must be more powerful than the PS2 purely because it is newer, actually claiming that it being a probable didn't matter when people pointed that out, citing "newer technology".
I can confirm it's definitely more powerful. Comparing Bayonetta 2 on Wii u to the switch version, the switch version doesn't have the framerate drops that the Wii u version did, and the graphics look better. The switch version of the first Bayonetta game also runs better than either the PS3 or Xbox 360 versions. Honestly that's all the proof I need...... Games run better.
If you take the factory specs from the X1, sure. But its not when you realize the X1 implementation Nintendo have gone for (for power and heat reasons) is clocked significantly slower than the vanilla specs state. Even less so when its not docked. Its the most logical thing they could have done, but it also reduced performance more than a little.
Silver Snake well tbh it's a handheld. But yes, ideally it should still be more powerful as technology has developed enough to have that power and more in a small form factor.
Silver Snake I like how you look at the launch dates, yet ignore that: 1. Switch is FAR smaller than the 360 in terms of size 2. It's also much lighter 3. It also uses lesser power draw That itself is very impressive. Like SpawnWave said, don't just look at the numbers, there's more than what meets the eye :P
avaman1993 kinda ridiculous but I guess that's where we at with these fucking video game reviewers and "techies". Spawnwave 4 lyf! Mass media is bullshit and I didn't even vote for Trumpy Dumpy so don't be calling me bullshit ass names cause I'm Mexican. Truth as it is, mass media is a fucking lie.
Haha, no. Spawnwave did an admirable job researching this vid, but Digital Foundry definitely know their stuff better. Spawnwave misinterpreted the bit about the Cell processor's 8th SPE being disabled to improve chip yield and spouted off some nonsense about it being some kind of live failsafe/backup instead. Who knows what other information he might be misinterpreting here?
@@YayWalterSullivan I don't think spawn wave misinterpreted that bit about the 8th SPE himself, I think he probably received the info that way, because wherever I read about it previously before this video was published explained it in almost the same way as he did, though not as a live failsafe thing but if one is permanently damaged.
Yup I can see 2 years. But I only see it having an incremental upgrade. We may not see a jump like the DS to 3ds or psp to vita for the next 4 to 6 years. By that time they can create a much more powerful switch that can probably output better performance than the PS4.
ZetaGammaFigma i used to like The Know until all their video titles started becoming clickbait.. however there's a silver lining in it, because now I'm watching SpawnWave for my news c:
The PS3 also had an additional link between the two pools of ram that I think ran at about 20 GB/s, this is how some developers could utilize some ram from either pool for some applications. In the end it just made the PS3 that much more complicated and was never fully utilized outside of inhouse games.
I love my Switch, I don't care about specs like your typical hardcore gamer. All I know is in less than 2 weeks I'm going to be playing Fire Emblem Warriors then shortly after that Super Mario Odyssey and then shortly after that Xenoblade Chronicles 2.
Made In Heaven .. yep and we can play them anywhere. I'm getting fed up with all this power talk. I just want games on my switch. It's powerful enough for good looking games. And despite what some say lol allot better than last gen.
Couldn't agree with you more, ive had my switch for 6 months and loving it. Mario odyssey, kart and splatoon 2 are amazing games and zbotw is quite possibly my favourite game on my favourite system since the dreamcast. Its an amazing system with decent enough graphics and the magic touch... Nintendo. Gamers forget its about games not grunt
About the Switch's performance: on the CPU side of things the Tegra X1 CPU is around 10% faster than the AMD Jaguar on both the PS4 and Xbox One. On the GPU side of things, the Nintendo Switch is considerably weaker than the Xbox One - about 30% when docked. Over 50% when portable. There. Even if weaker than the base model Xbox One, the Switch is still a LOT faster than the Xbox 360.
Wrong. The dock allows the Switch to draw more power and up its internal clock considerably since it doesn't need to run on its internal batteries once it's docked.
OtavioFesoares The dock for the Switch is just a HDMI output converter. The Switch could output 1080p in portable mode if Nintendo had added a 1080p screen. The Switch is nowhere near the Xbox One.
OtavioFesoares Wtf , no dude , the Dock it's just plástic , i open up the Dock in the house of my uncle , it did have nothing , just the HDMI imputado and the USB port , wrong for you
PSN Down no I think what Octavio is tryi ng to say is that the Switch's dock allows it's internals to run off of an outlet instead of an internal battery. By drawing more wattage the Switch's internals can run faster and perform better. He is right in that respect. As for the CPU/ GPU comparisons idk even if the Switch's CPU was more efficient it runs at a much lower clock speed
The proof is in the pudding. Look at Mario Kart 8 jumping from 720p to 1080p, or Zelda BotW jumping from 720p to 900p. Look at NBA 2k18 being comparable to PS4 version, or FIFA 18 not only looking better than 360/PS3, but running 1080p/60fps. Even in portable mode it outclasses last gen. There's 4X as much RAM and a modern architecture. Skyrim looks comparable to current gen Remastered version, and it's running freaking DOOM and Wolfenstein 2. Why is this even a debate...
If the majority of people really gave a shit about a port of a game looking slightly worse, then the PS2 wouldn't have been anywhere near as successful as it was as many of it's ports look shitty compared to the original Xbox/Gamecube versions
the switch is about as powerful as the PC i had back in 2008. and that was fairly more potent than a xbox 360, enough to run most of the consoles game at 1080p @ 60fps with similar graphics settings vs 720p 30fps.
the switch looks shitty on 4k tvs. that is a fact. I would have to go buy an old 1080p led tv to enjoy it. And the first gen ps3 had that amazing processor. not many used it to its true potential. I will just stick to my ps4. it looks way better than the switch on 4k. plus, fuck you Nintendo for giving up on the Wii u after so many people invested so much money and had very few games to play. I won't trust Nintendo ever again. And when you face facts, the switch is still not next generation.
If you think that the Switch is just the same as the 360... play through Blighttown on the 360 version of Dark Souls then the switch version of Blighttown then come back to me
True, buy PlayerEssence is the definition of a Nintendo fanboy. Dude couldn't even bring himself to criticise & potentially improve the Wii U over the course of its life.
Jeeses99 who the fuck told you that? The switch is far weaker than the ps4 and Xbox one gtfo of here with your lies. The switch is a great console but it doesn’t come with its shortcomings anyone saying otherwise is delusional
The SWITCH on portable mode is actually slightly more powerful than you said, as Nvidea gave it a 25% boost just 3 days after it launched. Also, as Nvidea said before, if Nintendo wants it, the docked speed can be increased, with no over heating problems.
The Wii U was more powerful than the PS3 and 360. MK8 runs at 1080p solid 60fps on Switch, 720p 59fps on Wii U. This argument that "The Switch is underpowered" needs to stop. It's running fricking Doom.
My point is, the Switch is vastly more powerful than the Wii U, yet still underpowered compared to the XB1 and PS4. It's like 5 or 6 times the power of the 360 and PS3. Those consoles came out over 10 years ago. Nintendo is not that cheap.
The Wii U is stronger than the PS3 and the Switch is stronger than the Wii U. How can anyone think the Switch is weaker than the PS3? It is very obvious it is stronger by just looking at the games on it.
@@xXSonTJXx-x We are already seeing the trouble the weeker consoles are doing there cpu are weeker then last gen consoles why you think they just added more ram and boosted the ghz of the cpu. Its shit we have to buy the same thing just an added 1 gb ram and boosted ghz
As a game developer I have to say, the Nintendo Switch is nothing like the X360 or PS3. Switch also has the ability to transfer two low-precision FP16 instruction per GPU core. (which even the XO and PS4 doesn't have) Theoretically this actually increase the GFLOPS operations to 768GFLOPS if using FP16 only. This claim is of course a bit far fetched and does not represent reality, because sometimes you want the precision of FP32 operations. However, what developers can do is to use certain parts of the rendering with lower precision, SSAO, anti-alaising, transparencies etc. It doesn't impact image quality that much but reduces the computational load. Together with the increased Raster Operations per clock and increase in memory and memory bandwidth we are looking at a far superior system to last gen.I think the games tell everything. Sure, they are cut back from the 180W PS4 or 120W XBOX One, but in the end, these games would never even run on the X360. Look at an Unreal game like Snake Pass, that doesn't even run on 1080p on PS4 (rather 868p), it's a complex, simulation-heavy game, and the Switch manages to run it at about the same performance levels at 648p. Sure some effects are cut back and rendered with less precision, but in the end... it's the same game. C'mon, look at Doom, that game would be impossible to run on a X360, and after the patches it runs beautifully in much higher resolution (still dynamic 720p though) and steadier frame rate.
@@basil7ksa that's not fair that the ps4 xb1 that have far better graphics and better performance than the switch all because the xbox one ps4 came out 4 years than the switch I'm jealous that a console that is 4 years older than the switch has great graphics
This type of in depth analysis is excellent, really excellent. I mean I like this channel already for the general games commentary and reviews but this type of tech analysis on top (similar in some ways to Digital Foundry style) is a welcome addition. Brilliant work man!
The switch is far more powerful than the Xbox 360 and PS3 is directly in between Ps4 and Xbox One and Xbox 360 and PlayStation At least in my opinion. Also the graphics shouldn’t be what makes a game good, it should be the gameplay and story and music of the game that should be more important. I mean look at Breath of the Wild, thats a beautiful game and they do it by adjusting the art textures to make it look amazing. And it does. Its so cool how you can tell if it’s raining and the ground will stay wet for a bit after it rains
As far as I'm concerned, the line between home console and handheld gaming has already been erased. I have a PS4 and a 3DS but my Nintendo Switch is pretty much the only console I play these days. It's just so convenient and there's so many good games that have already come out with more on the way.
Actually, I have a PC too, with tons of Steam games. I didn't mention it, though, because the subject is home consoles and handhelds. I probably play PC games the most. That's mostly due to Steam's many glorious sales. Also, there are some nice PC exclusives and, to be honest, I'm on my PC most of the time so it's just convenient to start up a game any time I want.
The best thing about the switch is that we are play GAMES and not movies. We play games to have fun, for about 15 years all we got were games that were flavourless and with no soul. It was all about graphics Vs fun gameplay. The switch is bringing back the fun in games and all I can say is thank you nintendo
Kai Draconus are you saying that from the last 15 years, there is no any good game? Loooooool, There are Tons of great gamesfor ps2/ps3/360, lol what is good for you splatoon ? Animal crossing? hahahahahaha 10 years old fanboy kid
Kuma Wilson is correct... GT 1030 has a spec of 900+ Gflops compared to the Switch's ~400. The GT-10 series uses Pascal, a generation newer than Maxwell. GT 1030 also draws twice the power of an entire Switch, so it's not like the Switch is underperforming, it just has less silicon and electricity to work with.
The fact that there is even a comparison between the current gen and last gen shows Nintendo gave up trying to be an equally powerful console. They stopped trying to be in the front line and went with gimmicks and features to sell consoles. Not saying it's wrong or right. The switch was the first system since gamecube that was even comparable
As a diehard PlayStation and Nintendo fan and anti xbox, it’s obvious af that the switch is more powerful than the last gen consoles. It should be common sense. Yes, the PS4 and Xbox One are definitely stronger, the Switch’s power is extremely remarkable for a console hybrid!! Just look at LA Noire on the Switch and Skyrim! They look even better than they ever did on PS3 and 360, although obviously skyrim remastered looks way better on PS4 and Xbone. But yes in short, Switch more powerful than PS3 and 360, but less than PS4 and Xbone.
I always thought of Switch as 1.2× horsepower when docked, turns out I was way off. Nintendo did something real balls by making such a powerful hybrid.
You can argue the specs all day long but Nintendo's strength has always been their games. I have a Switch and love it. To me this is their best system since the N64.
The Switch graphics are still great considering the size comparison to ps4 and X1. And keep in mind theres a fricken screen built into it. My mind is blown. Yet the best part about the Switch is its amazing IP's that you cant play on any other device.
It's actually kind of sad that you can't play any of these games on a device that's any better than the Switch. I have an LG G7 ThinQ, utilizing a Snapdragon 845 SoC and 4 GB LPDDR4. That's 8 CPU cores vs. the 4 that the Switch can use, and 512 GPU cores vs the Switch's 256. Much higher clock speeds, smaller transistor process. It kinda slays. I would love to play Switch games on this thing.
@@mrmaniac3 It's amazing how powerful smartphones have become. Grid Autosport for Android/iOS is literally the same game as the one released for PC and consoles back in 2014, but with graphics and performance surpassing that of the PS3 and XBox 360. It's sad how all this potential is wasted on horrible f2p shovelware horse manure.
@@Deanspall_ lol imagine being that dumb to to thing that's how porting games works plus news shock remastered has way higher system requirements then GtaV
Wii u was slightly more powerful than ps3 and xbox 360. Nintendo switch is 1.7 times more powerful than the wii u. I don't understand people who thinks Nintendo switch is closer to ps3 or xbox 360 in power. It's clearly is not, it's in fact much more powerful than the ps3 and Xbox 360
Maybe on paper more powerful. But the games themselves? To my eyes they don't look noticeably better than Dead Space, GTA 5, Last of Us, Far Cry 3 etc. And also consider how even the PS4 from PS3 isn't the biggest graphical leap, though there were many standouts in the later half of PS4 gen.
Hence why a lot of games from the 7th gen consoles were upscaled even to 720p when looking at the RAM situation. If you look up lists of games that ran at the native resolutions (whether it be 720p or 1080p), a lot of games could not even hit those resolutions and the systems had to upscale the games.
Late comment but.... The PS3 had more 1080p titles than the 360 which was a miracle as during the beginning. The system was showing itself to be too complicated, but later on you could see the difference between 360 and ps3 titles being more even or the ps3 looking nicer.
COOLMCDEN 219 the only way it could run GTA 5 if it's downgraded to hell. It would end up looking like the San Andreas remaster after they're finished.
So all in all the Nintendo switch is a bad ass portable console but still dosent compare to my Xbox one hell i would get down on a switch I've always loved portable console my favorite ones where the ds psp and ps Vita
It's really stupid to think that the Switch is less powerful than a Wii U. Think about it. A Wii U is more powerful than a 360 and a PS3. For any technology company to come out with a weaker successor is just plain stupid and for anyone to think that that will ever happen is even stupider.
Walther Penne the switch actually doesn't overheat much look up "let's overheat the switch" and you'll see that the only real danger of it overheating is with it on its back, in carpet, hooked up to a portable dock and playing something that takes up a whole lot more power than breath of the wild (I think the video might be on this channel but I'm not sure) also being different from another console doesn't make it not a console. That's like saying ps4 isn't a console because it's different from ps3 or any Xbox console
quit being dumb you fuck. my 1997 ran quake 2 at 110 fps. that's clearly more frames than the wiiu so does it mean my pentium mmx 233mhz with a voodoo2 is more powerful than a switch? ggez.
Great job Spawn Wave! As a gamedev I think people (consumers and press) generally give the switch a unnecessary hard time. One thing worth mentioning is that the PS4 only have 4GB of memory available for developers. The XO has 5GB left. With the generally lower resolutions and framebuffer sizes of the switch, this difference makes memory difference abysmal. I am comfortably making a multi-platform game, and the Tegra X1 is definitely a joy to work with.
Isn't Wii U's actually half of 352 GFLOPS.. 176? But its a much more newer and efficient GPU than 360's and is a bit more powerful, so GFLOPs don't tell the whole story
It's really unfortunate that you had to correct some misinformation being spread by a large journalist site that is supposedly focused on video games. Even if it is a freelancer and not necessarily their own employees, it's disheartening none the less.
The switch is the grey area between the ps3 and ps4, not as bad as the ps3 but not as great as the ps4 it’s in the middle and some games in the system lean toward ps3 hardware while others lean toward the ps4
Love how one freelancer for IGN trumps all the tech people and Digital Foundry who have said the Switch outperforms the 360 and PS3 in handheld and especially in dock. Can you say confirmation bias? And the best comparison is probably FAST RMX and FAST Racing Neo. The former is notably improved over the latter. Vastly superior image quality, much improved post processing, significantly better lighting solution, added effects on seceral tracks and vehicles, new tracks with greater polygonal complexity than older ones.
could be, I just know IGN's audience isn't the best, nor have they had a good track record for journalism. Alot of what they do kinda just implies they're feeding confirmation bias as you said.
Proto Craft Well again, IGN is a sprawling organization all things considered. More people=more opinions=less unified perspective on things. That's how you wind up with the Nintendo Voice Chat and an article titled "The PS Vita is set to Succeed" tied to the same site. So yeah, people go there to feed their own bias, but that's nothing new. IGN just so happens to be so large that you can find food for any lerspective within its writing.
Of course it's going to be more powerful. The PS3 and Xbox360 are from 12 years ago. And to be honest, I'm kind of disappointed that the Switch wasn't that much more powerful.
░KenLinx░ It's actually around 4x more powerful (when docked). Having a GPU architecture that's 10 years newer, and 8x the RAM to boot helps massively.
supersbbrawl4ever 4x isn't a lot for 12 years. The Switch is 4 years ahead of the PS4 and Xbox One, yet it's less powerful. In a 10 year period from the 90s, we went from basic 2D sprites to full fledged 3D models.
It could be much more powerful. Remember that the tegra X1 is essentially late 2014 tech (released in January 2015). The Tegra X2 from 2016 is double as fast with the same power consumption.
Explain me how it isn't ready ? There just isn't a reason for companies to buy this things for mobile use. NVIDIA decided to still use the old A57 Cores instead the new A72 ones to guarantee compatibility for usage in cars (basically the only ones except google that bought the X1) and the competition offers more energy efficient alternatives like Furian and Bifröst. Thats why we don't see tablets with this SoC (and that Apple currently dominates the high end ARM tablet market). The X1 failed at its targeted audience due to its way to high power consumption (it was still using Planar Bulk notes). Apples A9X was just much better (better CPU and similar GPU performance paired with much lower power consumption).
How much extra performance comes out of the half point precision capabilities of the Switch? (fp16) For instance, would we have a noticeable visual boost from those games that don’t use it to the games that do? Thanks for making this video!
As a PC gamer (who also owns all of the consoles covered in this video), I can vouch for this video making sense. Pure power does not equal performance. For example, look at AMD's Vega 64 GPU with over 13TFLOPs vs Nvidia's 1080ti with under 12TFLOPs. The 1080ti outperforms the Vega, despite having less raw power. It's not how much power you have, but how well you use it. Same goes for clockspeeds. Compare CPUs with same clockspeeds today vs years ago.
I had a 360 before a gaming PC. Unlike most, I don't really care which platform games come out on. I'm not biased, I don't fanboy for any particular platform. Sure PC is more capable than the consoles, but the consoles have their exclusives. And emulation on PC takes years to develop. Also, the analogies I provided are more familiar to PC gamers. Even on PC, the same rules apply. Power alone won't provide performance.
To simplify this, the Tegra X1 in the Switch can reach up to 512GFLOPS but since it's overclocked it's about over 300 in portable and maybe 400 while docked
I just care about the fun a videogame gives me. When the ps3 was one of the latest gen consoles with awesome games (and graphics at the time), I bought a less powerful Wii, it had shittier graphics, but man, the Mario Galaxy games were/are awesome and so much fun.... There's also the virtual console games, for example, you could play them on their original consoles (not very powerful at this day) or the latest (someday on switch, I guess)) and it'll give you the same great experience Great video btw, very informative :) *I hope you get my point, English isn't my first language :p
Ehh... not in all areas, the CPU was half a generation behind the Cell and Xenon (especially Cell) with the clock speed being ~2GHz less and the architecture being the same as or slightly superior to the GameCube and Wii's CPU, the RAM was DDR3 but the memory bandwidth is half of the 360's, However, the GPU and RAM amount was way ahead.
Yeah, it's a handheld device but with the kind of technology in the 2010's, don't be surprised that even small things have a whole lot of power. Currently, the Switch has outsold the Xbox One. I would say that the Switch is still more powerful compared to last gen consoles, as this gentleman explains.
if the GPU in the Wii U was more powerful and that was from the last-gen then Nintendo sure knew enough to make it more powerful than the 360 and PS3. this shouldn't be a question in my opinion. Cept the cell of course
@@xXSonTJXx-x GTA 4? I don’t know maybe it’s to old of a game and Nintendo doesn’t want to have it on their newest console and GTA 5 is just way to big for a cartridge. I don’t know about download though. GTA 5 is around 90gb in size
I moved on from the Xbox 360 and Xbox One to the Nintendo Switch in 2017. - The Defend Against The Following Three Years to 2016 by Ivangard C. Revita (born on November 16, 1996), Concluded in watching another feature film called The Lion King (2019) in the movie theater premiere (especially IMAX theater) -
compared in terms to what? the 360 and PS3 got beat out by the less powerful wii. the turbo graphics 16 and sega master system got beat out by the less powerful NES. while I will never say that hardware doesn't matter, it doesn't matter nearly as much as software. the Nintendo 64 was more powerful than the playstation but the playstation had a way better library of games than the 64 thus it stomped all over its face. good graphics have their place, but games are where the money is at.
I knew that ps vita woyd fail from the start I used to have one I had to purches sd cards cost me 13 dollers for a 4gb it was a joke I don't think Sony going to release a portable system soon Nintendo is my fave platform but I have to complain the 32 gb but its better than nothing nindendo needs 3 party titles :)
@@mystickkitsune3541 *would *start. I *one. I *purchase *cards. It *dollars *4 GB. It *joke. I *Sony is *soon. Nintendo *platform, but *complain about the *it's better than *nothing. Nintendo *titles.
