Yoshi-P says discussions about FFXIV on Switch and Xbox One are "Positive"

[Sebazy]

Now how about instead of standing at the marketboard with nothing more exciting going on than gil spamming, head into some mass combat on max settings. Your resource usage will balloon and your frame rates will probably drop too.

About the only unavoidable increase there will be CPU usage due to animation overheads. Even in Rabanastre, memory usage is in the same ballpark if not lower (I used Kugane's market board to force as many assets into memory as I could FYI, it's a complex zone with a large amount of characters around). In a theoretical Switch port both the memory and GPU usage would be scaled back very significantly through lower resolution textures and more aggressive LOD settings. In short, unless SE handle the Switch port like they did the Apple Mac port and just chuck it in a wrapper (Which is unlikely since it uses gameworks, porting to should be somewhat painless), it's not going to be a problem unless they suddenly and substantially up their production values (which isn't going to happen at this stage).

Also the size of the RAM (only 3 gigs total really? Awesome if you're living in 1999) is but one factor for performance. The amount of ram and how it is accessed and allocated as well as its speed is important to. Is it shared memory? It sounds like it is from what you describe. When a system has to share memory between its video card and main cpu *shudder* it's not a good thing for gaming. Perfectly acceptable for basic business applications though.

Ehm, I think every modern current generation console (The 3DS is the only exception that comes to my mind?) uses a unified memory architecture no? The original Xbox One has it's little ES ram segment but that's about the only variance going on here. It's also interesting to note that the PS3's memory architecture actually had comparable if not more bandwidth than the current consoles Being Rambus, I'd feel safe assuming it had awful latency though.

Don't get me wrong, I love a nice beefy PC setup as much as the next man (Currently sat infront of a 1080TI/X34A pairing) and no, I don't have a PS4/Xbox one because I'm rubbish with gamepads. Even with a PC of my setup, I'd still gladly put my money on a switch port for the convenience of it. I'd never touch Savage on it, but it'd be beautifully convenient for dailies and casual gameplay.

And yes, I do have actual experience in this field, whilst I narrowly miss the 1999 reference, I spent much of 2000-2001 porting Quake 3 to the PS2. We took that game from a 64mb footprint down to 16mb primarily through a huge amount of level optimisation and typically half sized textures and it's worth noting we actually had it running at 60 fps for much of it's development. It's a surprisingly interesting topic =(