Nintendo insider Emily Rogers has spoken to her industry sources who have informed her that the retail units of the Nintendo Switch platform will have 4GB of ram. She goes on to say that this is double the amount of ram that’s currently found in Nintendo’s current home console, the Wii U.
Emily Rogers Says That Nintendo Switch Has 4GB Of Ram In Retail Units
my latop has 16 and is 3 years old…
Your laptop isn’t a new Nintendo console.
may i ask the size of your laptop and compare to the size of the NS
You’re probably running Windows with a ton of applications on your laptop. For that, 16 GB are somewhat justified (although even 8 GB are enough for most use cases). There is no way a console would ever run that many applications at once, though, so it shouldn’t ever need 16 GB (unless maybe going full 4K, but even then 8 GB are usually enough). Depending on how they’re used, 4 GB inside the Switch can actually be plenty.
Your laptop cost at least $600.
So? We’re not going to be doing video editing on the Switch.
That’s also 16 GB of slow memory
How is this a good news? PS4 /Xbox One both have 8GB. This is disappointing. Ports will be hard to do. Again. History repeats itself.
Games nowadays are rarely limited by memory, and even if they are, optimizing for lower RAM consumption is usually rather straightforward and easy. At the most basic level, you only have to reduce the resolution of textures and can already save over 50% of memory on textures alone, which is often enough to make a game fit. The hard part in porting games (usually) really isn’t about optimizing memory consumption, but about optimizing performance.
Nobody buy a shitty port. Nobody buy Watchdogs,AC,COD ports on WII U because they looks like PS3/360 Ports.
Yes you can donwnscale Battlefield 1 and run it on WII U. But devs dont do this because nobody buy it. Console lifetime is 5 years. 4GB in 5 years is like 1GB today. Its a joke.
It’s like Xordok said it. History repeats itself.
That’s only true for people who already happen to own a PS4 or Xbox One. And even then, how does lower texture resolution instantly make a port bad? Especially in the case of the Switch handheld, which only renders at 720p, anyways.
Not to mention that the biggest appeal of the Switch is that you can play your games on the go, something neither PS4, nor Xbox One can do. Wii U was an entirely different story since it didn’t really add a major unique selling point to most of the crossplatform titles. Playing a game on the go definitely counts as unique selling point, though, so I’m confident that crossplatform titles would do a lot better on the Switch than on the Wii U.
I have 24GB DDR4 system ram and 6GB DDR5 video ram in my computer…you have 8GB in your under powered computer wannabees (PS4, Xbox One) now, is that a joke? 4GB in a tablet device that I can take anywhere and play awesome Nintendo games on…that’s pretty good.
The only history repeating itself are the worthless losers that get off by slamming things they don’t own. Grow up, get a job and stop complaining about things you don’t own.
You stupid fuckers seem to forget one thing…”IT’S A FUCKING POWERHOUSE TABLET”. That’s high for a tablet…sigh.
Also to add since the NS is using cartridges not much game data ram will need to be used, which is why Nintendo opted to go with cartridges as opposed to discs. Cartridges are not only way more faster than discs are in terms of reading info and loading assets but cartridges can also can hold more data without needing the amount of ram that discs require, in fact, if 3rd parties utitilize the capabilities that the Switch’s cartridge space will give them this will give the Switch has a huge advantage as far as ease of game development is concerned and could be a key reason why so many 3rd parties have jumped aboard or at least pledged support. 4GB will be fine for the type of system that the Switch is
that may mean the 4gb of ram would be justified.
And, once again, you have Aced your comment, Paid. Having the HD mobile/portable unit with just 4GB of RAM isn’t something to cry fowl about it… since the Switch officially confirms it’s game card based instead of discs. What gaming gossip Emily didn’t know that the docking unit could add 2GB of RAM once it’s connected onto your HDTV…. thus, a combined total of 6GB of RAM.
||Then you would have the definitive experience when it’s docked only which would defeat the purpose of the hybrid going by equal experiences…||
Who ever said it would be an equal experience, or what want that? The handheld aspect should not hinder the console aspect. Console first, remember?
||What I meant was equal experience as in equal content in the same game, like equal amount of enemies etc etc…||
Yeah but lets not forget that one thing nintendo did say, “it does not add to the system on the go”. Means its going to be at least 4 gb ram if rumor is true.
||I know, everything I said was only going by N-Dub Nation’s comment…||
hmmm…I just hope it is going to sell…
The dock does not add any memory or extra processing power to the Switch.
You know this how?…………..
||Most likely going by the NA Hive’s comment about it being nothing more than a dock for TV-output and recharge…||
||But it did not come from High Command so things are still not 100% confirmed…||
Official confirmation of that will be on Jan. 12th I think.
N-Dub Nation , seriously you sound like a fucking idiot and quite frankly a little bitch right now.
You act like you know shit about the gaming. Take your Damage Control garbage elsewhere..
And why would the dock add another 2GB of RAM? If the games are made to run with less, what would the additional 2GB do?
Are you saying the dock and the Switch connect at 25.6 GB/s? You’re saying it transfers the equivalent of over 20 USB 3.1 ports?
This could be for handheld use only. The dock could be like the dock for surface book. And have aditional ram and processing.
History always repeats itself with Nintendo. They are a bunch of stubborn morons who still think its 1999. Once again this will cause limited ports as seen in times past.
So disappointing!!
To be honest, my computer has 16GB arak and it can’t really run DK64. I don’t know if we should judge it by the ram when the system itself makes a huge difference.
Why did you use DK64 as an example of what your PC can run? Lol.
*16GB ram
Haha if that’s true, then we are going to see them blow the market up and outsell the competition by a large difference as they have done in the past. :P
Since they arent using disk they won’t have to off load as much data to ram. So take that.
Also this is just system ram. Vram has yet to be reported. The ps4 has 8 gigs of ram but only 1.5 gigs of it is allocatable by the games, 5 gigs are used by the apu(for graphics) and the rest is for the os, so this is actually a plus as far as consoles guy. You all need to learn how hardware works instead of barking big numbers.
It also depends on the type of ram it uses like GDDR5 vs DDR3 (PS4 and XBOX One respectively) or because different RAM types perform differently, but also, the PS4 uses 3.5 GB of ram for the OS with the XBOX One using around 2GB for it’s OS. Nintendo historically don’t use all that much (Wii U used 1GB of ram) ram for their OS, so in reality, it wouldn’t be all that far behind either of those consoles. PS4/XBO don’t even really use the full remainder of 4-5 gb of ram anyway. They have 8 to keep them future proof. 3 for the Switch would be plenty.
History is far from repeating itself. Nintendo did the correct things this time by approaching developers with their ideas, to listen to their feedback. This is a product developers are comfortable with, and CriWare, Epic Games and Autodesk being on board is the proof.
History will teach us nothing.
Don’t forget the Switch is using cartridges and has a custom Tegra chip, both of which can take of some pressure and also this is thing is basically a tablet 4 GB of ram is pretty good for a tablet, also the switch doc most likely will provide additional power when playing on the tv.
Almost all games on the PS4 and One don’t even use the entire RAM. They just use less than 3 GB of RAM, so it really doesn’t matter.
The minimun system requirements for PC games is at most 4gb of ram, so if the devs can make a game run on PC’s with 4gb of ram, why they wouldn’t do the same on Switch?
Not bad actually. The PS4 has 8GB of RAM and I think only 4GB is available for games. So if the NS has an OS that only uses 1GB of RAM then 3GB is going to be available for game devs.
Exactly. The big question is how much of it is for games.
Ps4 is 8 GB. 5GB for games 3 GB for OS. PS4 pro has 9 GB ram. 5.5 for games and 3.5 for OS/other things.
I’m not sure if the 9 GB for PS4 Pro are correct. I think it’s actually 8.5 GB only, and those additional 0.5 GB are only really used for the 4K backbuffer, so there isn’t really any extra RAM available for games. Of course the Switch doesn’t need a 4K backbuffer to begin with.
Yeah, I also hope it’s at least 3 GB available for games. It’s 1 GB on Wii U, which is a lot, but can still easily run out if you’re using a lot of somewhat higher qualit textures and stuff.
Damage Control detected.
No damage control, just trying to set the morons right.
Garbage.
I bet she’s just trolling us.
Didn’t the deluxe Wii U have 32GB?
The Wii U deluxe had 32 GB storage, not RAM.
The moment when you realize you know nothing about computers.
Well excuse me for not being a know-it-all computer geek.
4GB is not much. Honestly that’s gonna hurt the appeal of the Switch. It pretty much rules out 4k and virtual reality (which not many care for). The whole system is tiny and doesn’t seem too powerful so 3rd parties may not care to support it. For portable it’s plenty but as a home console it’s sounding pretty lacking and this is coming from a huge Nintendo fan! I just don’t see it competing well at all with Sony and Microsoft on the home console platform. I’ll still buy it but it might be Wii U all over again.
It may rule out 4K in games, but that was pretty much ruled out from the beginning, anyways. The Switch just won’t have the GPU power for that, that’s for certain, and according to rumors, its HDMI output won’t even support more than 30 FPS for 4K. That may sound disappointing, but honestly, not even the PS4 Pro can run games at 4K without compromises (that is, either at 30 FPS only or at very low details or at a resolution slightly smaller than 4K). 4K video streaming, on the other hand, is still absolutely possible with 4 GB of RAM (heck, even the 2 GB of the Wii U could probably do 4K videos in a dedicated video player application with an efficient decoder). I totally expect to see 4K Netflix support on the Switch.
As for VR, what does that even have to do with the RAM? VR is bound by GPU power, not by RAM. For VR, you need to render twice the frames, so you need more processing power on the GPU. RAM doesn’t matter at all here.
I think Nintendo’s focus for the power of the Switch (well at least the base model) was for the system to be primarily a dedicated native 1080p 60fps console. While the adoption rate of 4Ktvs are increasing, it’s not there yet to a point to where we need for the Switch to be 4K right out of the box. Nintendo could always release a 4K version of the Switch system that is VR capable in a couple of years down the road. It sounds like the Switch will be at least 4 times more powerful than the Wii U which is great and should guarantee some amazing looking games
Its a console. Its use “Unified Memory Architecture” for sure. Of course is VRAM important for VR and all games. How fast do you think is a gefocre 1080 with 1GB VRAM in 720p or 1080p?
What does the amount of RAM have to do with speed in the first place? If anything, the memory bandwidth affects speed, but not the amount of memory available. For VR, you’re going to need a second backbuffer (or a single backbuffer with double the size) to render the contents of the second screen to, sure. Aside from that, VR games don’t have a much higher RAM demand than non-VR games. The main bottleneck for VR games is the GPU speed, not the amount of RAM available.
It’s sad that like nobody realizes that RAM has speed and they only kind of know that storage has speed.
This is the Wii U all over again. FUCK!!
Try again, troll.
N-Dub Nation, quit acting your somehow relevant..
You’re one of the weakest links on this entire site.
You know it.. I know it. Shit even HollowGrapeJ knows it.
Bottom line is your Quadraxis bitch. End of story.
||The dog or the abomination, it’s one of you…||
What’s a matter? You having a hard time computing you waste of matter.
It’s time to pull the plug on this fat man behind the screen
Must be, because asshole trolls like you come out of the woodwork again.
Yeah, I’m afraid it’ll be another case of the Wii U again. I was very optimistic and excited after the reveal, but it’s looking less and less likely that the Switch will manage to get any multi-platform releases. I don’t personally care that much about having a huge library of third party games, so the only reason this bothers me is because I fear for the future of Nintendo.
I guess there’s a small chance that instead of another case of the Wii U, it’ll be another case of the Wii. Perhaps the portable gimmick will be enough to satisfy a currently unused market, still making the Switch decently popular despite (proably) not being available for multi-platform games.
That being said, we know so ridiculously little about the console that all we can do is speculate for another couple of months. Really wish they wouldn’t leave us hanging like this.
It’s not even close to the Wii U all over again. PS4/XBO only use 4-5 GB of ram for games out of their 8. The rest is used for their OS. The Wii U can handle games at 1080p 60fps almost perfectly in some cases (MK8) and those games are gorgeous, and it has HALF the ram available and a far weaker GPU/CPU combo. Bethesda said they would not make games for the Switch unless it was at least very close to being on par with XBO, and you can clearly see their name on the developer list. Relax, the Switch is easily in the ballpark with the current consoles when it comes to power, and besides, the Wii U’s biggest hurdle for multiplatform ports aside from user base, was it’s architecture, making ports hard. If you remember, it had ports of PS3/360 games doing stuff those consoles couldn’t do, with “weaker” specs. This thing will be just fine.
MK8 run in 720p @ 60 fps in 1-2 Player and 720p @ 30 fps in 2-3 player mode. Bethesda dont confirm any game for NS.
Three words, Socke– Non Disclosure Agreement. End of story.
||I think we use these days, PAGATF = Pointing a gun at their face…||
I hope you’re right, man, but it might all depend on whether the cradle really does improve performance or not, and if so, by how much. The IGN interview would suggest that the cradle/dock doesn’t up the power, while some rumors would suggest otherwise. If it’s true that the hardware mostly relies on the tablet, there’s no way it can compare to the PS4. On the other hand, like I said, it might not even be that big of a deal, as long as the console has enough reach.
I’ll agree that I exaggerated. After all, like you said, one of the main complaints from devs had to do with how difficult it was to develop and port for the Wii U, and I seriously doubt that issue will repeat itself this time. Other plus points being that the marketing has already grabbed the attention of many, they made sure to emphasize that there are more standard controllers to choose from, AND it’s much more clear that this is a whole separate console from the previous generation.
People complain about GB space on Nintendo systems, but Nintendo has a few things that Sony and Microsoft don’t:
Mario, Legend of Zelda, Pokemon, Kirby, Donkey Kong, SSB, etc. The main reason I buy Nintendo systems at all.
Sony and Microsoft don’t even come close in that department.
Wii U has all of those, and how is that doing, may I ask?
||They came too unmarketed, too sparse and too late so it doesn’t even compare or matter…||
The first party games are amazing on Wii U. The quality of games is not the important point, what really hurt the console was the advertising, the confusing name (remember how long the general public thought the Wii U is a Wii?) and the lack of third party support. Ports were too much of a hassle for the little sales they could expect from them, so developers stopped doing them. And it’s not just a power-problem, it’s the “inside” what counts as well, the Wii U is simply too different from it’s competitors programming wise.
What Nintendo needs to do with the Switch is make it easier for developers to port their games to that system, third parties don’t want to pour more money into ports with less sales than the ones on competing systems.
I’m no expert, so I’m sure there’s a whole lot more to it, but good advertising and making ports easier for 3rd party developers, is probably going to help. Nintendo has amazing games on the Wii U, it’s not the first party games that’s the problem. From Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze, over Mario Kart to Splatoon – Nintendo delivered amazing software, but they can’t survive on first party software alone.
The first party party games slowly came in though. The Wii U used to be the console everyone said had no games all throughout launch to 2014.
I thought the first party offerings were atrocious. Where’s metroid? F ZERO? Fire Emblem? Animal Crossing? Kirby? Did I mention where’s metroid already?
I’m not saying it has a horrible lineup but FOR ME it sucked hard. Again, the lack of a new metroid game really sucked when there was no good reason to not have a metroid game this gen.
Probably too busy working on that 3DS game that most people did NOT want.
Sure but I dont want to buy 2 consoles just to play third party/Nintendo games! Nintendo consoles never have amazing Pokemon games that intrest me personally, and Donkey Kong, Kirby, Star Fox never made enough changes like Mario,Zelda,Metroid did when they became 3d. They are basicly still the same game as 15-20 years ago. Altough Starfox and DK 64 are worth mentioning. And theres a huge hole in the lineup ever since Rare left Nintendo who produced amazing game after amazing game for Nintendo.
All you did was name their franchises and state your opinion as fact. Lol.
DK,Kirby and star fox still look the same as the Snes. Mario 64, Zelda Ocarina of time and Metroid prime are all getting credit for changing the genre into the new age (So will Zelda BotW) , making the step from 2d to 3d in a great way.
@ Hollowgrapej
And even if i’m wrong I still need to buy two consoles just to play third party and Nintendo games wich people should not have to if they make descent consoles.
And look how many Wii Us that sold compared to PS4 & XBOne with a year head start.
You guys just don’t get it.
“The only reason a console needs so much these days is because discs aren’t fast enough to pull up the needed assets.
The super fast access speeds of cartridges eliminate the need for assets to be preloaded onto RAM, therefore decreasing the amount of RAM needed overall. The game essentially is preloaded onto its own “RAM cartridge”. Why else do you think the PS3 had to make the 7.8GB jump in RAM to the PS4? Disc read speeds aren’t good enough.
Also, Nvidia compression techniques far exceed AMDs.
People making direct comparisons with the opposition seriously seem to have no idea how hardware works.
Let’s take Overwatch at 1080p, maximum settings. Very nice looking game, barely uses over 1GB of VRAM on my system, so share that with the other 2GB it barely uses of system RAM.
The Switch will be fine.”
Source: Some geek off reddit
Interesting.
||Most never have any idea about anything, they just draw their own misguided conclusions…||
That was 32GB of storage, not ram.
Why bother showing the tweet? You literally re-wrote it, then showed the tweet with the exact same information.
||It must be Nintendofied first before posting…||
For the source to be right there.
All I really care about is if this thing has a much better library of games than the Wii U had. If it does that, I’ll be happy as a clam.
If it gets a new metroid or fire emblem I’ll be satisfied. If not then *looks at nearby gun* it’s TIME TO GO!
I’m taking this with a truckload of salt. While Emily has been right before there are also plenty of occasions where she’s been wrong.
Remember when she claimed that Xseed was publishing Devil’s Third?
Nintendo ended up doing it.
How about when she said there were absolutely no new Starfox games in development?
Starfox Zero happened.
Or maybe when she said you could play as Linkle in Breath of the Wild…okay so you get the idea.
The point is that she constantly reports incorrect information, then when people try to call her out on it she has the nerve to get upset and act like it’s not her fault (look at her twitter, she’s done it plenty of times). I’m gonna wait for Nintendo’s official announcement in January and try to ignore all this “rumor” nonsense until then :P
Just going to wait this one out for the official spec’s. Although, I don’t see why a little extra would have hurt.
I feel like this needs to be said every time we’re talking about RAM, but we’ll do it again. There’s no point comparing the RAM in your computer/laptop to that in dedicated gaming hardware. Your laptop has to run bulky Windows OS, plus a million other processes in the background while you’re gaming. Your games console does not.
A better comparison to note is that it has double Wii U, but half of Xbone/PS4. That said, I know in the case of PS4 that only ~ 4GB of that is usable. If Switch has a very streamlined OS then it’s not impossible that it has a very comparable amount of RAM.
Yes, and also like someone said above there is a difference to disc based system as the cartiridge allows for much faster loading times, hence less RAM needed. Disc based systems need to store more game data in the RAM due to the slow reading speed of discs.
At least have the same amount as your competition, not half. Well, we’ll see how all this plays out real soon. Fingers crossed for nintendo.
I don’t see this being true. Devs would have to change shit around far too much in ports to ensure a lower RAM usage. The Xbox has 5gbs of RAM seperate from OS usage, with the PS4 using 4.5gbs of RAM seperate from the OS. In comparison it’s highly likely the Switch’s OS will take 1-2gbs for it’s own OS, with Nintendo ususally being lightweight in the OS department, it’s likely to be closer to 1 or 1.5gbs. That leaves 2.5 to 3 gbs for the games, which doesn’t leave a lot of breathing room for big name devs during the porting process.
The other big problem with this being considered true is how that essentially kills the chances of Skyrim’s Special Edition hitting the switch. The game uses upwards of 3gbs of RAM, which could definitely cause some issues if the OS were to even use as little as 1gb of those limited 4gbs of RAM. I mean, they could definitely port it with lower quality textures, and that could even be the reason good ol’ Todd “It just Works” Howard said that it’s inclusion wasn’t confirmed yet, but that still doesn’t make it a good thing.
Then again, this is like the 12345678th rumour for this console so far, so I could care less about anything mentioned prior to January 12th.
Reducing memory consumption is really one of the easiest aspects of game porting. As you already mentioned, at the most basic level, you just need to reduce texture resolution and can already save over 50% of memory used on texures. Optimizing performance is really the harder part of porting games.
I just hope it gets third party support. I just want to be able to play skyrim on the switch!
Ram is very important in Open-world games especially. Making sure the backgrounds and the draw-distance is far enough that you don’t notice the world just beyond your view doesn’t exist visually until you get closer. There has to be a buffer-one so whichever direction you go is pre-loaded otherwise you get what happens in “X” all the time… A world that can’t keep up, destroying the illusion of “open world” because WiiU had so little Ram.
The fix, is installing these assets on your hard disk, so they can load faster, compensating for the lack of ram. X allowed you to install texture packs, helping mitigate the WiiU ‘s poor specs. X is not only one of my favorite games, it also is a perfect example of why Ram is so important, especially if you want gorgeous, open world games to run properly.
Just taking a guess, it seems logical to me that what was stated above could be accurate, that using game carts could help reduce the huge dependence of Ram. The Xbox1 installs much of the game to its hard drive AND has at least 4 gigs of ram, allowing spectacularly detailed environments.
Switch games might be competitive with current console tech, IF devs can indeed use larger carts. And I’d be surprised if we don’t see a $60-80 Xb1/PS4 game run an additional $10-$20 higher on switch. That’s how the N64 worked folks. That’s if Devs will take the time to port.
This leaves me with 1 critical concern for Switch, and that’s the lack of space. That seems to be the bottleneck to me given what we know so far.
I think Nintendo would push to have all the games sell for the same price. Maybe they’ll absorb it themselves. They know they’re not top shit anymore.
That would be a smart thing to do sir. Ofcourse Nintendo hasn’t absorbed anything, including not taking a loss on their consoles. But, new Pres, and given the Switch Trailer, a new strategy. So here’s hoping you’re right!
I’m pretty sure that the short draw distance in Xenoblade Chronicles X had nothing to do with RAM, but was only there for better performance, to make the game run at a stable 30 FPS. Low RAM doesn’t really hinder draw distance at all. Objects far away are always rendered as low-quality versions of themselves, anyways (this is true no matter what console you’re on). Those low-quality replacements take little perofrmance to render and also little memory. If anything, more RAM helps getting more detailed views of objects far away, but this is also limited by performance, anyways. As for installing game data on the disk, that didn’t have anything to do with RAM OR performance. The only purpose of that was to slightly decrease load times. The game data still had to be loaded from disk into RAM to be usable in game, but the Wii U’s internal disk has a slightly faster access speed than optical discs on the Wii U, so games would load slightly faster. The same pretty much goes for cartridges. Data like models and textures still has to be loaded into RAM before it can be used in rendering, but loading data from a cartridge is faster than loading data from discs. It doesn’t really help performance or draw distance, though.
Sorry, but Ram stores previously rendered textures and other assets. It doesn’t really affect the draw-distance, like I think you said, but my point was, while walking around an open world game, with low ram, everything has to be re-rendered again and again. If the carts have the assets stored on them, them, accessing them will be a Hellava lot quicker than pulling them from a disk. If the WiiU had more Ram, it wouldn’t have had to re-render the world so often, or pull the textures from the disk so often. They could be pre-rendered or at least stored in Ram from the last time you saw what you saw.
I work as a game programmer and what you said is rather far from the truth (though to be fair, in some cases you probably meant something entirely different and just worded it badly). “Saving rendered textures to RAM to save time” is a myth and I’m not quite sure where you got that from. That could only make sense for render targets that only need to be updated every few frames, such as, for example, the view of a camera that you can see in your game on a screen or something like that. Use cases like that are rather rare, though. The general case is that you completely need to rerender everything every frame. This is true for the Wii U as much as is it is true for the PS4 and Xbox One. What you probably meant in your comment is “loading textures into RAM”, but I’ll get to that in a second.
As for “pulling textures from discs”, that does indeed happen in open world games, but not in the way you’re thinking of. It’s not something that happens constantly (like every frame or something like that), at least not for textures that are currently needed for rendering. Pretty much all open world games are internally split into areas and only when you transition between different areas are textures reloaded, but only for the neighboring areas of that area (the textures for that area itself should already be loaded at that point). This loading happens asynchronously on a different thread (in the background) while you’re playing the game, so you won’t notice it, since there is no loading screen. It has little to non impact on performance and there are only few occasions where this has any visible side effects at all. In the case of Xenoblade Chronicles X: when you visit a shop or Skell workshop, it usually displays a low-resolution version of that Skell or armor piece for a few seconds before it displays the detailed version of that Skell or armor piece. This is one visible side effect of textures in the background still taking some time to load. In this regard, cartridges might actually slightly help because they would decrease loading times, but the game would still have to load all textures and models into RAM before it could use them. As for textures being loaded mid-game from disc hindering the performance, that is a myth. No modern game is coded like that, loading of assets always happens in a background thread in all decently coded games.
Actually, I’m pretty sure the ram does affect the Draw distance in some ways.
Nah, it doesn’t really effect draw distance. The main thing that hinders draw distance is high triangle counts and all the possible overdraw that can happen drawing things for such a long distance. Games get around this with LODs AKA using lower quality models for distant objects aggressively culling hidden polygons before they’re sent to the GPU. Once it’s in the GPU, that’s where overdraw becomes an issue. To get around that, the best thing IMR GPUs have is sorting draw calls from front to back to prevent shading of hidden polygons.
Basically, it’s just a higher work load and it’s more likely to be limited by the RAM’s speed than the amount of RAM.
This amount of RAM could mean very good things for price. If it’s $250 I see no problem with it selling.
$250 is way too good to be true. I see it being at the very least $300-$350.
I’ve been saying that Nintendo could sell the set with dock, joy-cons and power adapter for $249.99. It might go for $299.99, but I hope not. I think that $250 would be more important to it’s survival. Nintendo doesn’t have to profit off the system, just break even.
The amount of memory isn’t the only thing that matters. It’s speed, type, and bus width all factor into performance and price. Larger bus widths mean they’re using several smaller chips. Since it’s Tegra based, it probably uses LPDDR4 instead of GDDR5 or DDR4 so it’s price and performance is between the two. The speed would be the clock speed of the memory.
If the Switch uses the same memory controller setup as the X2 then it’s four 1GB chips, if its the same as the X1 then its two 2 GB chips.
Maybe the Switch will use GDDR5X or HBM with higher clockspeeds. Let’s wait the damn thing come out and see how it works.
The problem with waiting, Is a lot of people want to play AAA games, and they want to know if they should get a second console, or upgrade, or wait for more Switch details in hopes they can finally have the Holy-grail of gaming… A Nintendo console that plays current, 3rd party games.
Still, we have no choice but to wait. It will just be a harder wait for some than others.
||You will all get your answers in Janaury won’t you?…||
||*January, this FF virus…||
Wow the Switch has been very disappointing so far. Wii U all over again! :(
And it won’t get better at all. Not unless nintendo miraculously starts caring about franchises other than their AAA brands.
There is only 4gb because it is a mobile platform. I don’t think mobile platforms support more or if it can utilize that much.
This is nothing new. It is probably Android based with a custom software. It is basically a Shield Tablet from a few years ago. A touchless tablet.
Just buy a GPD XD and emulate. http://www.gpdxd.com
All the arm chair engineers are out, speaking like they are professional Nintendo engineers & that they know 4GB of RAM is not going to be enough. Talking like they know the entire architecture of a system that isn’t even out yet.
For me, portability plus an improvement in specs over the Wii U is a win-win. If a 720p screen, 32GB of internal storage, and 4GB of RAM help to lower the price over more competitive hardware, I’m all for it.
I’d rather see a minor step up from Wii U performance at $250 – with the added bonus of being able to transport the thing easily – than a $400 machine that walks toe-to-toe with a vanilla PS4.
Does the Switch need third-party support? Yes. Does it need the best-looking version of the biggest AAA games? No. Nintendo needs FIFA, Madden, NBA 2K, and Japanese developer support to pad their own line-up of games – which should be more healthy if the Switch really is narrowing the focus of (almost) all of Nintendo’s teams to one platform.
If the system sells well and is easy to port to in general, developers will optimize their games to run on the system. They will already be making their games scalable to XBO, XBOS, PS4, and PS4P.
Is that so eh? Well ok
My phone has 6 gigs of ram
So you bought something you just don’t need or will most likely never use. Just like the 557ppi screens on Samsung phones. You cant see 557ppi anyway, why pay for it? Sounds like you were conned by the great marketing machine.
Before I judge the horsepower of this new device, I want to see how the games look if they look naughty or nice.
For some reason it seems as if Switch can get some good looking games that according to the spec sheet doesnt say the same.
And the Wii U fooled the specs sheets exactly the same. Wii U may have been wrak but it fooled the spec sheet.
*weak
Since they arent using disk they won’t have to off load as much data to ram. So take that.
Also this is just system ram. Vram has yet to be reported. The ps4 has 8 gigs of ram but only 1.5 gigs of it is allocatable by the games, 5 gigs are used by the apu(for graphics) and the rest is for the os, so this is actually a plus as far as consoles guy. You all need to learn how hardware works instead of barking big numbers.
Also we can’t forget that until it comes from nintendo them selves we can’t believe a thing thats said.
In case anyone else hear is clueless, Storage and RAM are two completely separate components.
So you can’t really use Wii U’s 32GB as a comparison to Swicth’s 4GB.
Wow, once more my mobile made yet another switcheroo on my words.
It should be “here” not “hear”, lol.
I bought a laptop in 2011 with 8gb RAM and my XBox One also has 8gb
Nintendo.. nintendo……
NINTENDO. …….. this doesn’t surprise me. Nintendo sucks and i dont care, there commiting suicide and i don’t care, fanboys are in deniaaal and i dooont caaaare! This song suucks baaaallls.
#nintendonoexpectations
Come on guys the faster you admit reality, the faster your wounds will heal, the fanboys are like a kid with abusive parents, some might confuse the abuse with love, well sorry to say but nintendo neglected its fanbase lol. poor bastards.
Ive accepted since the shitty wii u came out nintendo and its fanboy are self sabatoging themselves. history repeats, it’s another bareboned console thats not going to have any games.
Ahhh.. the Kyoto whore finally reveals herself under the vail of harlot red and intoxicating perfume..
This is the bitch, the slut if you will,, who for years will gave our heart too…
I’ve loved her since I was young. She made me feel something I’ve never felt before as if was all I needed. That she was ALL i would ever need.
Of course other consoles were tempting and even downright beatiful but not once did I ever think to cheat on this Kyoto whore.. Because I loved her and she told me she loved me.. She kept me warm and satisfied. Super fucking Mario 3..
And then one day after years of commitment I could smell the stench of clam and fishsticks from between her legs All the way from across the room.. She wasn’t the same, always secretive, never talking to me like we used to. Hiding things from me only to reveal them at her convience completely ignoring how I emotionally felt.
This is when I realized she was fucking the casuals…
She has since been removed from my life. I even met a nice Sonyan girl.
But this Kyoto whore has since shown back up at my door telling me “Pleassa’unda Staan baby, Me luv you loooonnng time, you gota’American dollar?”
But then I hear news of 4GB of RAM, unknown 16GB cartridge capacities and yet to be revealed gaming hardware mistakes and bottlenecks.. And I can’t but to smell …. fishsticks..
So that means your icyboy’s girlfriend?
Ehhhhhh if that is his girlfriend, Ice boy has bad taste did you see Sosari’s face?
I sure did xD LOLOL ROLMAO
Man, the trolls are rampant today. And sickr, I thought you kicked out the anons?
My old ass 2005 PC had this much RAM. Laughed when I saw this.
Yea, and the RAM is probably 1/10th the speed of the Switch’s RAM.
Emily Rogers doesnt know shit lol
Yea, she only got like everything right about the Switch. Idiot.
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Sure. Whatever you say, Emily.