BTW, same guy on famiboard that had many inside information about the dev kits before, who said that Nintendo is looking into giving back a CPU core and more VRAM after OS stabilization, also said that a DLSS revision is coming by end of 2025. All this might be why there's not many dev kits around, CDPR themselves said the dev kits they had were not final.
Can't wait to see what they can do to improve DLSS "lite"
the Deck almost always however has a CPU advantage. the Zen2 CPU it has is far superior to the Switch 2's CPU... but since you're almost always GPU bound in modern games, it doesn't come into play all that much I'd say.
It has potential higher clocks but I disagree on "far superior" claim? Not for an APU design engineer I would wager.
This is the, as far as I've seen, the best compilation of CPU IPC/PPC comparisons on the same Geekbench 5.1 benchmark that I found on the internet. Sucks he stopped updating it.
Page 8 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
forums.anandtech.com
ARM A78 has better IPC than Zen 2, and this is desktop Zen2, not the balls chopped L3 cache CCX which normally would insulate zen 2 from slow memory but pairing it with LPDDR5....
well I'll quote chips and cheese who microbenched it because I could never come up with somethign this savage : "The LPDDR5 setup therefore saddles the CPU with garbage memory latency, while providing bandwidth on par with a DDR4 setup out of late 2015."
ARM A78 mobile class CPUs are built around these slow ass memories.
Even with massive downclocks on Switch 2 and the A78 IPC
918*1.1/3 = 336
A desktop Zen 2 3950X (really not Van gogh), 1317*(2.8/4.6) = 801, 2800MHz is more reasonable expectations in gaming than 3.5GHz synthetic benchmarks
Rough estimate of PPC by multiplying cores, It's not exactly that of course but both have the same "shortcut".
336*8 = 2688
801*4 = 3204
A78C for 8 clusters actually has been known for best A78 series multithreaded performance
While Zen 2 one CCX means multithreaded performance suffer compared to two CCX configurations such as Renoir's
Both have some loss of OS dedicated inevitably, how much Windows OS/Steam OS eats up I don't know but I haven't had a 4 core CPU on PC since AMD Phenom II. How much is the slower cache and memory speed affecting that Zen 2 PPC? I don't think its that clear cut.
Switch 2 has less impact by OS taken ressources as it has more cores, with 2 cores out for now and 1 core coming back later
336*6=2016
336*7=2352
Steam deck, I don't know how we would even know how to find that information but lets just take 1 core out, surely its that at the least.
801*3=2403
And again, that's interpolation from a 3950X's data. Ain't no way Van Gogh has no drop from that number.
This is peanuts difference. "Far superior ain't it". It has the chance to speed up beyond.
Switch 2 also has the 1.7GHz boost clock mentionned for demanding operations or future updates as per DF and dev kit information. Then its bye bye, even at 3.5GHz boost clock, Switch 2 gets ahead.
More importantly the core area for performance per area is completely on A78's favour its not even comparable, Zen 2 is 32.1% of an A78 PPA/GHz. This is important for an APU and efficiency, size of the portable, etc.
If you would to go back in time and design the Steam deck with both options in front of you, for same "thick" boi ? That ARM CPU can easily do 2.2 GHz and it wouldn't even be a match. Nintendo's philosophy that it cannot thermally throttle while the exhaust is filled with cat hair and in the middle of the saudi arabia is not typical.
