[nsxwolf]

Does anyone really find the Switch 2 to be underpowered? Is the Steam Deck really that much more powerful, and is it worth the extra 100 grams of weight?

Metroid Prime 4 looks amazing, and you can choose 4K@60 or 1080p@120. I don't really care about generated frames or whatever AI magic the console is doing to pull it off, it looks great.

[chocochunks]

It's not really. The CPU in the Switch 2 isn't the most amazing and the Steam Deck has 4GB extra RAM (but it's also got a lighter OS), but the GPU is worse on Deck. Switch 2 offers pretty comparable performance in handheld mode, better in docked and devs are more likely to tailor games for Switch 2. FF7 Rebirth looks like trash on Deck, even on my faster 780M handheld it was pretty ugly, I had to hack in FSR3/4 support for it to look remotely decent. Switch 2 by comparison looks better. Star Wars Outlaws is another example.

[FunHearing3443]

The switch 2 is definitively more powerful than the steam deck and also supports DLSS.

[dragontamer]

> 4K@60

Parts of Samus's gun and some parts of the UI are 4k.

I'm a Nintendo fan but this 4k@60 claim from Nintendo is incredibly laughable. The vast majority of the screen is upscaled.

I think there were a bunch of 4k Hatsune Miku games that came out. It turns out that 2D renderings at 4k can be accomplished with very low end hardware.

The game looks good because Nintendo has excellent artists. So I guess it's worth the money. But the technical specs are completely baloney.

[nsxwolf]

4K mode looks better to me than 1080p on my TV, I'm not Digital Foundry so I don't know how to count pixels or whatever. I would imagine most people don't care much and can't see the difference from where they are sitting in the room anyway.

It more than gets the job done, the job I hired it to do is make the games impress me visually and allow me to experience the thrill of technological progress, and it does that very well.

[dragontamer]

4k is a technical spec. It's the same as lying about the horsepower of your car.

Nintendo (and NVidia) are playing games with specs. And it's incredibly off-putting to me.

Lying about small things means the company will lie about large things. This sort of thing erodes trust, especially because 4k is so easy to test and figure out.

-------

There are other words for better than 1080p. Such as 1440p or 2k. Which is closer to what the new Metroid game actually does.

[scblock]

"The vast majority of the screen is upscaled."

I have bad news for you, friend. You just described AAA gaming on anything less than a 5090 (and not even then, at all times). Without DLSS or FSR many modern games won't run smoothly at 4k on typical hardware (such as a 5070, which costs more than a Switch 2, or a 5060, which costs about the same).

[dragontamer]

I know.

That's why it's laughable that a Switch2 would play anything at 4k@60Hz.

So I'm just pointing it out and laughing at the fanboys. It is literally laughable. This is a tech site where I expected more people to know what these words mean rather than echoing (clearly bullshit) marketing points.

This is a console with 100GB/s memory bandwidth. Like come on guys. It's a whole order of magnitude to weak to make a claim like 4k@60Hz, but all the Nintendo fans are just gobbling up the marketing without thinking.

100GB/s is closer to 2010 era tech (PS3 or something) than 2025.

[InsideOutSanta]

It's an odd criticism to begin with. The Switch is a toy, it's not a PC. Apart from a few shitty PC ports, it runs its games just fine, so in what sense is it really "underpowered"? Would Super Mario Bros. Wonder be a better game if the Switch 2 could push twice as many polygons?

[lightedman]

"The Switch is a toy, it's not a PC. Apart from a few shitty PC ports, it runs its games just fine, so in what sense is it really "underpowered"?"

Well this comment down below brings it about really quickly:

"Switch 2 has better FPS for Switch 1 games. Like BotW stops having terrible FPS drops in certain scenarios."

If you need a newer-gen piece of hardware to run an older-gen FIRST PARTY title at acceptable speeds without issues then I'm going to say you are ABSOLUTELY and PURPOSEFULLY selling underpowered hardware (and Nintendo has been doing it since the days of the NES. So many first-party titles with slowdowns because the hardware was not up to the task.)

[9x39]

Switch also tried to live in the portable console niche, above handhelds, and this was several years before Steam Deck. SOC development favors the later devices, obviously.

BoTW was still generally acceptable to people: https://www.metacritic.com/game/the-legend-of-zelda-breath-o...

[maccard]

Compared to Xbox and PlayStation it’s vastly underpowered.

They’re not “shitty PC ports”, they’re ports that people tried, likely managed to one platform and then when they tried on switch 2 realised just how far behind it is.

[johnnyanmac]

>Compared to Xbox and PlayStation it’s vastly underpowered.

Sure, the same way an IPhone 17 is vastly underpowerred compared to a PS5. I'd hope we don't need to go into details on why that's not a very useful comparison.

>They’re not “shitty PC ports”,

Garbage in, garbage out. They are called "shitty PC ports" because the port to the PC from the PS5/XBX was bad, without the specs excuse.

[Fricken]

Yeah, but does having twice the polygons make the game twice as fun? It does not. The Switch is only behind on metrics that don't matter.

[maccard]

No, but that's like asking does having half the polygons make it half as fun.

[9x39]

How well do Pokopia and Mario Galaxy play on PS and Xbox?

Performance is orthogonal to the Switch aims, which are about those tightly curated Nintendo titles.

[maccard]

> Performance is orthogonal to the Switch aims, which are about those tightly curated Nintendo titles.

I disagree. https://opencritic.com/browse/switch%202 Half of the top rated games on Switch 2 are multiplatform titles

[someguyiguess]

The steam deck is 4 year old hardware. The Switch 2 came out last summer. So if they're about on-par performance-wise, doesn't that prove OP's point?

[semiquaver]

Holy goalposts-moving, Batman!