Nintendo Switch's iGPU: Maxwell Nerfed Edition
chipsandcheese.com
chipsandcheese.com
> 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.
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.
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.
I literally use a Switch controller over bluetooth with my switch emulator.
Design counts for so much more than triangles. A Series X game character has twenty times the polygon count of an Xbox 360 character yet somehow Johnny Silverhand looks like plastic-skinned garbage compared to Marcus Fenix.
The switch port likely struggles because it needs to be compatible with the other versions for cross-platform play, so it has to support the same resources (map layout/assets etc) that higher end machines do. There’s a limit to how much you can optimise something when you can’t fundamentally alter it and still keep your other customers happy.
I’ve only played BoTW (and I enjoyed it a lot), but tbh I can’t really remember any distinct environments except maybe the volcanic region, Kakariko village and the Korok forest. IMO the minimalism of the game world simply doesn’t give the designers enough “tools” to create impressive environments, at least compared to games like Horizon Zero Dawn or Red Dead Redemption 2, or even Skyrim.
https://i.redd.it/3sm84daxpai21.jpg
Even though the actual models are relatively low detail compared to something like HZD or RDR2 (which also look great).
If you took a random segment of the population and let them try the top games on a GameCube versus a PS2 in 2023, I think the GameCube would win handily.
How does constraining color and design schemes allow for more art freedom? There are much fewer options in art design for game developers on a hardware-constrained platform like the Switch as against PC or the mainstream consoles. You can make minimalist and cartoonish games on them as well, if you wish.
There have been a fair few non-photo-realistic games on PC and console but they’re not system sellers, and rarely move the needle.
For every Hades there’s pages on pages of indie games in Steam and the PS/Xbox marketplaces that hardly anyone has played or ever will again - many of which were well received by critics but just didn’t sell.
Look outside games for a moment, at the "Spider-verse" movies. Universally lauded for their splashy, comic-book style animation. Imagine those movies if the CGI was photorealistic… or if they were just straight-up filmed!
Fantasy and fantastical stories benefit from artistic flair. Even a game like Call of Duty, IMO, would benefit from some cel-shading and a more rotoscoped look. (I'm probably the only person who was disappointed to see that the next GTA game looks more like reality than GTA box art, which always should have been their stylistic lighthouse.)
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.
Unsteady 30FPS with terrible frame pacing is nothing that consoles can brag about.
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.
There are no compatibility concerns with refresh rates:fps. And there are TVs but more importantly monitors that exceed 120hz.
COD doesn’t reach a steady 120 fps on consoles — a VRR display is helpful with the fps dips as low as 60 fps.
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
Forspoken does use DS on Windows. No need to wait for the future.
Forspoken can’t base the design around instant load times, because most PCs don’t have DirectStorage over ultra-fast NVME drives. Even those that do, don’t have coprocessors to read from the drives, meaning they’re eating up massive amounts of compute to read that fast.
Not even a little bit the same as the situation on the PS5.
Yes, the PS5 has a special chip -- because it's CPU is too anemic to decompress the data that fast.
But DF has shown Forspoken to load faster with an adequate CPU + NVMe than PS5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8_HcLb4ajY
If you look at this video it makes the case better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VODSVVkKRD4
Forspoken is a game that's not built with rapid loads in mind - it's designed to work on a range of hardware that will in the worst case include spinning hard disks (or more realistically, basic SATA SSD drives). That it can load assets relatively quickly on a high end machine with DirectStorage completely misses the point - the pipeline just isn't there to load assets at a consistent fast pace like it is with the PS5 architecture (and the XS architecture).
In the example above from Rift Apart (which to the best of my knowledge is not using DirectStorage to be fair), the frame-rate dives hard on any asset loading task. DirectStorage is more efficient with this, but it still chews cycles to move the data in the absence of dedicated hardware - there's just no way around this logically, and that's the point. The developer is constrained to designing a game in a way that will work consistently across hardware.
Faster loading screens are better than slow loading screens, but they're not better than no loading screens at all. Likewise, having games introduce elevators to nowhere or tunnels of nothingness to allow assets to be loaded is not a problem that you can work around on current PC titles - it fundamentally limits how the game is designed, not just how well it performs.
The PS5 CPU is far from anaemic, and buying a really expensive CPU for a PC with double the core count to get less real-terms performance doesn't seem like a great trade-off.
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.
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.
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.
See this DLSS diagram from nvidia for example: https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/geforce/n...
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.
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.
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.
Rendering and then downscaling produces better render quality in total (e.g. aliasing).
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.
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.
Maybe nothing is the way to go.