[qwytw]

> the Nintendo Switch, and Nvidia looks set to power the Switch 2

Which runs a very old mobile chip which was already outdated when the Switch came out. Unless Nintendo is planning to go with something high-end this time (e.g. to compete with the Steam Deck and other more powerful handhelds) whatever they get from Nvidia will probably be more or less equivalent to an mid-tier of the shelf Qualcomm SoC.

It's interesting that Nvidia is going with that, it will just depress their margins. I guess they want to reenter the mobile CPU market and need something to show off.

[coder543]

We already have a good sense of what SoC Nintendo will likely be going with for the Switch 2.

Being so dismissive of the Switch shows the disconnect between what most gamers care about, and what some tech enthusiasts think gamers care about.

The Switch 1 used a crappy mobile chip, sure, but it was able to run tons of games that no other Tegra device could have dreamed of running, due to the power of having a stable target for optimization, with sufficiently powerful APIs available, and a huge target market. The Switch 1 can do 90% of what a Steam Deck can, while using a fraction of the power, thickness, and cooling. With the Switch 2 almost certainly gaining DLSS, I fully expect the Switch 2 to run circles around the Steam Deck, even without a “high end chip”. It will be weaker on paper, but that won’t matter.

I say this as someone who owns a PS5, a Switch OLED, an ROG Ally, and a fairly decent gaming PC. I briefly had an original Steam Deck, but the screen was atrocious.

Most people I see talking about Steam Deck’s awesomeness seem to either have very little experience with a Switch, or just have a lot of disdain for Nintendo. Yes, having access to Steam games is cool… but hauling around a massive device with short battery life is not cool to most gamers, and neither is spending forever tweaking settings just to get something that’s marginally better than the Switch 1 can do out of the box.

The Switch 1 is at the end of its life right now, but Nintendo is certainly preparing the hardware for the next 6 to 8 years.

[qwytw]

> Being so dismissive of the Switch shows the disconnect between what most gamers care about, and what some tech enthusiasts think gamers care about.

What makes you think I am? Hardware wise it's an equivalent of a unremarkable ancient Android tablet, yet it's pretty exceptional what Nintendo manage to achieve despite of that.

> The Switch 1 can do 90% of what a Steam Deck can

That's highly debatable and almost completely depends on what games specifically you like/play. IMHO PC gaming and Nintendo have relatively little overlap (e.g. compared to to PS and Xbox at least).

> Steam Deck’s awesomeness

I never implied that the Switch was/is/will be somehow inferior (besides potentially having a slower CPU & GPU).

> but Nintendo is certainly preparing the hardware for the next 6 to 8 years

It's not obvious that they were the first time and still did fine, why would they change their approach this time (albeit there weren't necessarily that many options on the market back then but it was still an ~2 year old chip).

[coder543]

> IMHO PC gaming and Nintendo have relatively little overlap (e.g. compared to PS and Xbox at least).

That was true back in the Wii era, because there was nothing remarkable about the Wii apart from its input method. It was "just another home console" to most developers, so why bother going through the effort to port their games from more powerful consoles down to the Wii, where they will just look bad, run poorly, and have weird controls?

With the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo found huge success in third party titles because everyone who made a game was enthusiastic about being able to play their game portably, and the Switch made that possible with hardware that was architecturally similar to other consoles and PCs (at least by comparison to previous handheld gaming consoles), which made porting feasible without a complete rewrite.

In my opinion, basically the only console games that aren't available on Switch at this point are the very most recent crop of high-end games, which the Switch is too old to run, as well as certain exclusives. If the Switch were still able to handle all the third party ports, then I don't even know if Nintendo would be interested in a Switch 2, but they do seem to care about the decent chunk of money they're making from third party games.

The overlap with PC is the same as the overlap between PC and other consoles... which is quite a lot, but doesn't include certain genres like RTSes. They've tried bringing Starcraft to console before, and that wasn't very well received for obvious reasons, haha

> It's not obvious that they were the first time and still did fine, why would they change their approach this time

I'm not sure I was saying they would change their approach... the Switch 1 is over 7 years old at this point. I was just saying they're preparing the next generation to last the same amount of time, which means finding sufficiently powerful hardware. The Switch 1 was sufficiently powerful, even for running lots of "impossible" ports throughout its lifetime: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENECyFQPe-4

All of that to say, I am a big fan of the Switch OLED. I'm honestly ready to sell my ROG Ally, just because I never use it. But, being a bit of a contradiction, I am also extremely interested in the PS5 Pro. My PS5 has been a great experience, but I wish it had graphical fidelity that was a bit closer to my PC... without the inconvenience of Windows. For a handheld, I care a lot about portability (small size), battery life, and low hassle (not Windows, and not requiring tons of tweaking of graphics settings to get a good experience), and the Switch OLED does a great job of those things, while having access to a surprisingly complete catalog of both first-party and third-party games.

[pjmlp]

Actually there is one remarkle thing about the Wii, but it hardly matters in this context, it was one of the very few consoles out there that actually had something that relates to OpenGL, namely the shading language and how the API was designed.

Many keep thinking that Khronos APIs have any use on game consoles, which is seldom the case.