that only do 720P without pumping it through an HDMI port?
I would think, given the prices of 4k tv's that you could at least get to 1080P, but like most anime, higher resolution for Nintendo games may not buy you much...
I mean you can pick up an octo-core 1080P tablet with 4GB of memory for under $100 US.
The limited screen resolution isn't due to some technical limitation relating to the display itself, it's a power consumption thing. They could have put a 1080p screen in the Switch, and they could have clocked the Tegra X1 high enough to drive it (they dramatically underclock it), but the battery on the launch model would have lasted around an hour and a half. People already complained a lot about the official battery life of as little as 2.5 hours in the original launch model, and celebrated the 4.5 hour battery life of the later revision (it was from a die shrink). And even achieving that battery life required clockspeeds low enough that it can't always maintain 720p30 in some games.
I suppose you could say it's also a cost thing. These things are built to a cost. It launched in 2017 with a 20nm TSMC processor when TSMC had already been shipping 10nm chips for a while. A new Switch today could probably push much higher than 720p with reasonable battery life if they put a 5nm chip in there, but they won't. They'll use an older die process to keep costs down.
That $100 tablet has a screen that's unsuitable for games, with huge response time ("grey-to-grey") that smears moving images, high latency, and probably PWM or other annoying stuff. The non-Lite Switch has something like a minimum of 4.5 hours play time when the brightness is at maximum and the game is very demanding processing-wise, and more like 7 hours on average. According to Nintendo (it actually provides this info, which is suprirising), after about 800 charge cycles, the battery's charge capacity dr
Leaving aside what others are saying about power consumption, quality on metrics such as latency, etc, the price comparison isn't entirely fair: Android tablets at this point are a commodity item, and what you're buying for $100 is quite possibly being sold below cost and atypical. Nintendo is more risk averse than, say, Sony, and definitely doesn't want to make losses on the hardware side overall, which means the MSRP has to be quite a bit higher than the BoM. That's probably not possible if they're selli
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the `social
sciences' is: some do, some don't.
-- Ernest Rutherford
Are there a lot of other "systems" (Score:2)
that only do 720P without pumping it through an HDMI port?
I would think, given the prices of 4k tv's that you could at least get to 1080P, but like most anime, higher resolution for Nintendo games may not buy you much...
I mean you can pick up an octo-core 1080P tablet with 4GB of memory for under $100 US.
Re:Are there a lot of other "systems" (Score:5, Informative)
The limited screen resolution isn't due to some technical limitation relating to the display itself, it's a power consumption thing. They could have put a 1080p screen in the Switch, and they could have clocked the Tegra X1 high enough to drive it (they dramatically underclock it), but the battery on the launch model would have lasted around an hour and a half. People already complained a lot about the official battery life of as little as 2.5 hours in the original launch model, and celebrated the 4.5 hour battery life of the later revision (it was from a die shrink). And even achieving that battery life required clockspeeds low enough that it can't always maintain 720p30 in some games.
I suppose you could say it's also a cost thing. These things are built to a cost. It launched in 2017 with a 20nm TSMC processor when TSMC had already been shipping 10nm chips for a while. A new Switch today could probably push much higher than 720p with reasonable battery life if they put a 5nm chip in there, but they won't. They'll use an older die process to keep costs down.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Leaving aside what others are saying about power consumption, quality on metrics such as latency, etc, the price comparison isn't entirely fair: Android tablets at this point are a commodity item, and what you're buying for $100 is quite possibly being sold below cost and atypical. Nintendo is more risk averse than, say, Sony, and definitely doesn't want to make losses on the hardware side overall, which means the MSRP has to be quite a bit higher than the BoM. That's probably not possible if they're selli