Hoshino Lina (ζ˜ŸδΉƒγƒͺγƒŠ) 🩡 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!
I've always wondered about the video clipping stuff on the Switch... 30 seconds is 1.2GB of raw video (720p30 8bit 4:2:0) so obviously it has to encode footage into H.264 in real time all the time to be able to keep the buffer in RAM to save a clip. I wonder how much battery that uses? I bet runtime would be perceivably better if you could turn it off...
Mar 27 at 2:45pmWeb
Show threadFormula2d ago
@lina There are games that, at least for some parts, don't allow you to record clips, like Persona 5 Royal. But I don't know if the system actually disables the background recording.
Show threadTim2d ago

@lina Hmm. Maybe?
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7034337 paper describes a hardware h264 encoding taking 115-235mw

and nintendo https://www.nintendo.com/us/gaming-systems/switch/tech-specs/ says it consumes ~4W (handheld ofc), so 235mw is about 5% of the battery usage, assuming those numbers.

Show threadOngion πŸ₯šπŸž2d ago
@lina Smash Bros Ultimate disables video clip recording for a performance boost, so apparently it also has a noticeable impact on compute throughout.
Show threadkepstin2d ago
@Ongion @lina the video encoder on these things is dedicated hardware, but it still might use shaders for pixel format conversion... probably a bigger deal for performance is that it's using precious ram bandwidth and reducing available ram.
Show threadTrif1d ago
@lina I'm sure there is a slight performance hit, but my assumption is that it's using hardware encoding similar to e.g. NVIDIA ShadowPlay and should be pretty efficient, right? Same for GameChat, I doubt they would've gone ahead with that if it cost more than a couple %.
Show threadHoshino Lina (ζ˜ŸδΉƒγƒͺγƒŠ) 🩡 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!1d ago
@trif It uses dedicated hardware encoding so it should have a small *performance* hit, but that hardware still consumes not insignificant power.