Great that you're having fun. Consider buying a real Switch as well. For me it excels in two use cases:
* Playing (Nintendo) games with the entire family (4 people, all holding a small controller): every Nintendo game is very thoughtfully designed to get 4 people through the "flow" before the game starts (pick your character, set the options etc.)
* Playing games in the portable/detached mode, it is a joy to hold and unlike a tablet you have physical controls. Most games are so much better than your average iPad game (or better said, the "match three" or mindless clicker games do not rise to the surface as easily as on iPad).
It also creates a ton of e-waste for a few hours of entertainment when you already have the compute power available to you in another portable device you already have to own anyway.
False equivalence (at least). Software we want to run is not just about raw compute available. Licensing of Nintendo's software aside, what if the pocket computer I have isn't mine? If I buy a Switch, I own it.
Just about everything creates waste. Being into any hobby is expending energy in pursuit of leisure. You're opting into excess from the jump.
I've messed around with emulators in the past. To be honest the tweaking and fiddling with things drove me mad. It was 100 times easier to just switch on a dedicated device and dive into a game.
Then again I'm not buying the latest games or consoles, I've got some other ones that I dive into every now and then for a distraction.
For BOTW specifically you're better off playing on CEMU (Wii U emulator) as it's the exact same game(not a more limited version as one would assume) but significantly faster. TOTK you'll need RyujinX.
Exact numbers are hard to give: native game resolution or native macbook resolution? Docked or undocked? Shaders cached or not? Graphics mods (some of which are efficiency/performance related) or not? Generally though most games run at native size at native speeds once you get everything going. BOTW/TOTK are some of the heavier ones though and, ignoring BOTW as I play that on CEMU, TOTK runs alright as long as you don't push it or expect high FPS mods.
Dont know OP, but I am playing pokemon scarlet on it, m1 max macbook 15, and its pinned at 30fps.
Don't know if the game just wants to run at 30fps, or if my macbook can't go any faster. But since its stable at exactly 30, I assume it's the game
From my experience with yuzu and ryujinx, in order to exceed 30fps, most games need to be modded. Almost all popular games have a mod available though.
Most Switch games don't run at 60fps in docked mode because they can't nearly hit the framerate at 1080p. The Switch has dynamic resolution scaling but it still lags.
For this reason many games only run at 60fps in handheld mode.
* Playing (Nintendo) games with the entire family (4 people, all holding a small controller): every Nintendo game is very thoughtfully designed to get 4 people through the "flow" before the game starts (pick your character, set the options etc.)
* Playing games in the portable/detached mode, it is a joy to hold and unlike a tablet you have physical controls. Most games are so much better than your average iPad game (or better said, the "match three" or mindless clicker games do not rise to the surface as easily as on iPad).