Wait until the new iPhone kills the mobile gaming market. It’s probably going to be more powerful than the switch 2. Slap on a backbone controller or a dock and you don’t need a game console at all.
The current gen android stuff is also pretty capable but nobody makes games that aren’t gacha trash for android.
Pushing the leading edge of phone design opens new use cases, it’s not always just about “doing the same shit, slightly faster”
Have you thought about why Switch is the best selling console in the current generation even though it’s by far the weakest in performance?
The performance of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 GPU is already about 10-20% faster than the A16 chip, depending on the benchmark.
Even if Qualcomm only gives the Gen 3 a 10% performance increase, that is enough to beat or even surpass the A17 in gpu performance (rumors suggest something closer to a 30% increase). The Gen 2 already outcompetes the A16 in GPU power consumption and efficiency as well. This may change with the A17 since it’s on TSMC’s 3N node, however this node has been having issues which is why TSMC introduced the 3NE and 3NP so we will have to wait for power usage numbers from the A17 to see.
Overall I’m disappointed with the improvements between the A16 and A17. 10% on the CPU and 20% on the GPU (due to have 20% more cores) doesn’t seem like the type of upgrade I would expect from switching nodes. Hopefully next year they can do more with the improved N3 nodes. I’m also getting the feeling that Apple is trying to deploy more complex transformer models on their devices which is why we are seeing such a focus on the NPU.
I think you hit on the main point which is that nobody will pour money into developing for android. Apple also has the ability to make deals with companies with Capcom and Ubisoft to ensure games come to their platforms. I can’t see Google doing this since they already “tried” and failed to have a AAA mobile gaming platform with stadia. The only other company with enough motivation and money to bring big games to android is Samsung, but their mobile chips aren’t doing too well (despite their RDNA 2 architecture making it easier to port games).
Steam could step in with a proton layer if they wanted to. Android is technically linux already and the newest snapdragon stuff is comparable to the steam deck in raw power.
We’re ripe for some multiplatform shenanigans.
Unfortunately, Valve would also have to build a CPU translation layer (Like Rosetta 2) since games run on x86 architectures and snapdragon uses an ARM architecture. The steam deck uses a Zen 2 CPU architecture which is already x86 so there would be little motivation on their part to do this. Currently proton uses wine to convert windows api calls into linux calls. The big thing Proton does is allowing games that use DirectX to run on Vulkan which is natively supported in Linux. So unless Valve makes the Steam Deck 2 with ARM or another company decides to make an x86 to ARM translation layer, then I don’t see something like Proton coming to android any time soon.
You bring up an interesting point, and now I’m wondering: how would a gaming-focused phone sell in a post-Switch world? We all remember the Xperia Play, but maybe it was just too early. What if Apple released an “Arcade edition” of the next iPhone for $1000, which featured a slide out controller or some other slick integration of physical controls? How well would that sell, and what impact (if any) would it have on Switch/Steam Deck sales?
I mean, Asus and nubia have been making a gaming-specific phone for many generations now. Razer even gave it a try back in 2018, but I don’t think they released any follow up devices.
Lenovo also made a couple devices, but announced earlier this year that they’d be discontinuing their gaming phone business.
There seems to be a fan base and market for gaming-specific phones, but given Lenovo and Razer got out of the game and the fact that you haven’t seemed to have heard of any of these devices/product lines: my guess is that they are super niche.
I think the biggest issue is titles; what people expect of mobile games, perpetuating itself into a weak catalog of original titles, with a few good ports. Mobile games are largely designed to be heavily-monitized, Games as a Service, and/or gacha titles… profitable design choices, but not because they make games better.
Having a more standard control scheme would help get more ports of console games, but I’d love to see more mobile games that use the existing interface/formfactor well. Pokemon Go circa 2018 was a good game that only works on mobile, and I’d love to see more of those.
We’ve been hearing about Apple coming back to the gaming market for quite a long time now and absolutely nothing happens. The iPhone 15 isn’t going to change anything in this regard, it’s going to be a party trick with a handful of popular games ported to it and then nothing else.
Even Apple has to abide by the laws of physics. 3nm is fast, but a small, tightly packed, passively cooled device containing a large, heat generating element powered by a another large, heat generating element is unlikely to outperform a well ventilated, actively cooled device that is able to draw power from an outlet.
This is of couse ignoring the Apple reality distortion field, which in recent memory has succesfully perpetuated the idea that a tiny photo sensor can outperform a large one.
