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.
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.
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.
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
So there’s a chance the Deck and modern PCs could emulate the system pretty quickly. Thanks Nintendo!
Thanks to the rise in PC ARM CPUs (Apple Silicone and Snapdragon X), emulating the Switch (also ARM based CPUs) has become extremely easy and efficient. My windows PC needs 180W to emulate Mario Kart 8 at ~60fps while my MacBook Air M2 only needs 15W for better results.
My phone can emulate switch with less than 5W, although it’s not perfect in every game
please share, what’s your phone specs? what emulator? is there a guide or tutorial?
There is just 0 competition at the current steam deck price point.
That much is a given. Nintendo never goes for top-performance (well, not since the 90s) and it wouldn’t make sense for them either.
Nintendo never goes for top-performance (well, not since the 90s)
GameCube was more performant than PS2 and only a little bit less performant than Xbox. Biggest downside was its small disk.
The issue with Nintendo is that to their true core, they are still a of card games company that inspire to become the next Disney. The problem with GameCube was polluted with the “for family first”, without realize that their original NES '80 kids where 15~20 year older… not little child anymore. People didn’t want the “Super Mario Sunshine” console, they wanted Resident Evil 4, Silent Hill 2~3 kind of console. The people that buy today the switch are probably clueless parent that buy the “for child” console… or a Nintendo Adult as parallel for Disney Adult.
Nintendo is at its best when doing something no other game developer would do, and getting laughed at until everyone realizes how great it was in hindsight. What’s new about Switch 2?
INB4 it’s gonna be a repeat of the Wii U. A confusing, non compatible successor to a revolutionary product.
INB4 it’s gonna be a repeat of the Wii U. A confusing, non compatible successor to a revolutionary product.
A bit too revolutionary. Wii had a seriously bad attachment rate. People bought Wii Sports, Mario Kart and Smash. Regular games sold badly. Wii was a party gimmick that collected dust on regular days. Wii U was the attempt (later fulfilled by Switch) to be a regular gaming machine as well.
Yes but the main reason those consoles were so shaky is specifically because they did not address a much younger audience. The original Wii kind of tried to but if you look at its best sellers, a ton of them were not aimed at adults.
The same is true of the Wii U where rather than targeting that audience, they tried to pivot to a more adult console with games like the zombie launch title.
So most of the success of the switch is just that it finally was a family console again. But keep in mind, they have nowhere to pivot to. That’s why the switch 2 is what it is and why it’s so late. They can’t afford a misstep and they also can’t afford to saturate the only market niche they have left.
I think I’ve read backwards compatibility is confirmed, which these days there’s no excuse not to.
I don’t think their choice of chips was what they meant. The Wii’s motion controls, and the Switch’s portable/docked modes and removable controllers are.
