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Nintendo Switch 2 performance boost to fall short of Valve's Steam Deck
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this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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The performance was never the consideration for Nintendo. They want a handheld that can last a long time, so they will always clock their chips down. You can't compare 30 watts all the time to 30 watts plugged in, let alone 5 watts in handheld mode.
Steam Decks are great, but lets be real; when you play a big AAA title, even on moderate settings, you might get two hours out of the machine pushing it to the limit at full TDP.
This is kind of a nothingburger story. We always knew Nintendo were not going to scale their machines up to the level of PC gaming handhelds.
Us folks with original model Switch's ain't barely getting two hours either, though.
Let's see how long the Deck battery lasts after 7 years. Luckily the batteries in both are replaceable.
With a lot of effort sure. The batteries aren’t a simple swap like they should be.
I fully agree with the first sentence, but i don't think the second quite hits the mark. The real reason is simply cost.
If Nintendo was concerned with battery life, then they'd still go with a modern processor, but as you say clock it down to hit the efficiency sweet spot over chasing performance. But instead they usually choose something that is already dated at release (even accounting for development time), as opposed to a company like Apple that pays a premium to get first dibs on any new processing node.
I think it's prudent to be on an older node, using stock that's more abundant, even if it's older - especially if it still performs the duties well enough. You're 100% on the cost side of things, especially considering that Nintendo has never had any consoles that were crazy expensive. Everything was always supposed to be family friendly and therefore family attainable.
I still think battery life is a higher concern for them than sheer power when in handheld mode though, and that's a key differentiating factor between a Deck and a Switch, besides the Nintendo first-party library and chip architecture. It's really cool that the Deck is flexible enough to do both high performance and low performance tasks with toggles for the draw.
And IIRC Nintendo doesn’t sell their consoles at a loss assuming they’ll make up the loss on licensing fees, so that’s an added incentive to pick a cost-conscious design.
For me, One of the issues is while it's docked it doesn't clock up. The current switch basically runs at half it's potential.
Hell, The path for a switch pro would have been easy. So you have the regular switch which can be docked or handheld, The switch light which is handheld only, you could have had a switch pro which was dock only. And change the form factor so that it has a bulkier cooling system better power delivery, and then clock up the CPU/GPU and then make it so the RAM never clocked down... But they didn't because it would have made just how bad the other two were actually running.
I’ve been playing fallout 4 with a shit load of mods and it feels like I’m doing legitimate harm to my deck sometimes. Super neat that it works, but yeah it’s like 2 hours MAX.
Still kind of amazing considering it’s a full ass AAA game with graphics settings you’re not allowed to touch by default lmao