(We don’t have a Switch platform sub-forum yet, so posting here instead.)
In particular, I am asking whether anyone here have their hands on a Switch dev unit?
I am wondering about a few things:
Even though we more or less know Tegra X1’s performance, it would be nice to establish a ballpark polygon threshold for Switch specifically (so we can plan asset and scene accordingly).
Potential limits to lookout for, I have seem a few benchmark for Unity-powered 3D games on Switch. It varies from great to not so great. It would be nice to design around them.
In short, there are more than a few Unity games released (or to be released) on Switch, but we don’t have a guide like the mobile one yet, I would love to gather some feedbacks from devs on that. (hopefully you are not under Nintendo NDA!)
There really isn’t any polygon threshold on modern rendering architectures. Performance is a combination of polygons, shaders, lighting effects, etc. You could have one polygon on the screen taking a full second to render each frame if your shader was too crazy, or millions of simple flat-shaded unlit polygons.
Once you get a dev kit you can access the official Nintendo support forums, people there are more likely to know the answers.
True, one of my thought is to delay worrying about it until we manage to get a dev kit. And focus on other similar platform such as entry-level Mac (similar in power).
If you really want to get a jump on things, get yourself an nVidia Jetson TX1 development kit - the Switch uses an off-the-shelf TX1 as its SOC, its CPU/GPU aren’t custom at all, except the clock speeds the developer can choose to run it at when docked and undocked (which can be found with a Google search, as early documentation with the available clock speeds did leak).