> 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.
First 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.
This 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.
Regarding 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.
That, 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.
Part of this is having to design for an amorphous target, whereas a console is a very known quantity for tuning resource usage (far beyond what you can put in a settings menu).
The other side of this is that the consoles have technology far in advance of PC’s that people are unaware of because for whatever reasons they wrongly chose a long time ago to decide that GPU’s were all that matters.
As one example: the PS5 (Kraken) and XS (Velocity) have dedicated decompression and storage access hardware that allows access to the NVME without chewing up CPU cycles. This is massive for resource loading and not something that currently exists in the PC world. Even where some amalgam of it might exist soon via DirectStorage, it’ll not be ubiquitous, so it can’t be designed in to the core of PC versions of games because not everyone will have it.
This is a pretty critical difference when you see it in a game like Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart or Spiderman 2. There’s no equivalent that would allow those games to be ported to PC without significant compromises. Even texture streaming is dramatically faster than on the highest end PC.
I can dig out the tests on this if anyone cares to see it, but reading from a gen 4 NVME at 7GB/s takes something north of 80% CPU usage on a 5800x if memory serves.
I don’t think the problem is necessarily PCs being inefficient. IMO it is more likely that it is simply much harder to optimize for random hardware combinations that people run, and that there is a lot of pressure on devs to optimize console gameplay (likely at the expense of optimizing PC gameplay, perhaps devs also see less of a need to since most PCs are better equipped than consoles anyhow, that and deadline pressure)
People 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.
The 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.
IGPs have had unified memory for more than a decade. Consoles use variants of those.
Whether toolkits on PCs can transparently make use of unified memory when on IGPs though I could not tell you, and I would not expect game devs to cater much to that.
Is there any reason the hardware on say Intel integrated GPU hardware shouldn't be able to do the same? Even outside of gaming the rise of composited desktops seems like motivation to push for low copy + low latency graphics systems.
That'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
Keep 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.
very 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.
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> 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.
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.
The other side of this is that the consoles have technology far in advance of PC’s that people are unaware of because for whatever reasons they wrongly chose a long time ago to decide that GPU’s were all that matters.
As one example: the PS5 (Kraken) and XS (Velocity) have dedicated decompression and storage access hardware that allows access to the NVME without chewing up CPU cycles. This is massive for resource loading and not something that currently exists in the PC world. Even where some amalgam of it might exist soon via DirectStorage, it’ll not be ubiquitous, so it can’t be designed in to the core of PC versions of games because not everyone will have it.
This is a pretty critical difference when you see it in a game like Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart or Spiderman 2. There’s no equivalent that would allow those games to be ported to PC without significant compromises. Even texture streaming is dramatically faster than on the highest end PC.
I can dig out the tests on this if anyone cares to see it, but reading from a gen 4 NVME at 7GB/s takes something north of 80% CPU usage on a 5800x if memory serves.
Talk starts at 4 minutes: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KasVMOMWM-4
Unsteady 30FPS with terrible frame pacing is nothing that consoles can brag about.
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.
Whether toolkits on PCs can transparently make use of unified memory when on IGPs though I could not tell you, and I would not expect game devs to cater much to that.
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.
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See this DLSS diagram from nvidia for example: https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/geforce/n...
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.
Deleted Comment
Maybe nothing is the way to go.