So basically, the Deck and Switch 2 are roughly inverted in compartitive hardware power… the Deck has a more powerful CPU, the Switch 2 has a more powerful GPU.
That is different in significant ways than an x86/64 CPU.
How the system allocates memory is also… a confounding factor.
Sometimes you have just one kind of RAM shared between the CPU and GPU. Sometimes there are different kinds of RAM for the CPU and GPU.
It looks like the Switch 2 is sharing LPPDR5 RAM between the CPU and GPU, as the Deck does… on the Deck, you can use CryoUtils to manually adjust how much is allocated to which.
The Switch 2 will… maybe have a standardized allocation for all games, or allow certain games to adjust the allocation.
And then if course there is port quality, and proton…
It gets pretty complicated to estimate just purely from specs alone.
Hence why the PC centric crowd is so much into empirical testing via benchmarks.
That low ram is going to hurt the new switch pretty quickly, I think. I wouldn’t get a newish pc/laptop if it didn’t have at least 16g ram these days. They’re going to struggle again with ports.
core count x clock speed hasn’t been a good metric for about 15-20 years, but if we go by that anyway then it looks like the switch2 will be slightly worse than a steam deck.
If the switch 2s hardware isn’t better than the Deck, then of course it will.
Do we know what the switch2’s hardware is yet?
If the leaks are correct its:
Full specs:
Handheld Mode:
Docked Mode:
I personally don’t know how that compares to other hardware though.
(Edit: Thanks for the replies!)
Here’s the OLED Deck specs for comparison:
APU
(which contains:)
CPU:
GPU:
…
RAM:
Storage:
EDIT: More details
https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Steam-Deck-OLED-APU-Processor-Benchmarks-and-Specs.799065.0.html
So basically, the Deck and Switch 2 are roughly inverted in compartitive hardware power… the Deck has a more powerful CPU, the Switch 2 has a more powerful GPU.
EDIT 2:
also the Deck has 33% more RAM.
Consoles can also do more with less since the games are (unless they’re shitty ports) designed for that specific hardware.
Yep, this is always a factor, even with PC games.
For example: the Switch 2 uses an ARM CPU.
That is different in significant ways than an x86/64 CPU.
How the system allocates memory is also… a confounding factor.
Sometimes you have just one kind of RAM shared between the CPU and GPU. Sometimes there are different kinds of RAM for the CPU and GPU.
It looks like the Switch 2 is sharing LPPDR5 RAM between the CPU and GPU, as the Deck does… on the Deck, you can use CryoUtils to manually adjust how much is allocated to which.
The Switch 2 will… maybe have a standardized allocation for all games, or allow certain games to adjust the allocation.
And then if course there is port quality, and proton…
It gets pretty complicated to estimate just purely from specs alone.
Hence why the PC centric crowd is so much into empirical testing via benchmarks.
That low ram is going to hurt the new switch pretty quickly, I think. I wouldn’t get a newish pc/laptop if it didn’t have at least 16g ram these days. They’re going to struggle again with ports.
core count x clock speed hasn’t been a good metric for about 15-20 years, but if we go by that anyway then it looks like the switch2 will be slightly worse than a steam deck.
Might be somewhat comparable to a laptop RTX 3050: https://tech4gamers.com/nintendo-switch-2-equipped-with-5nm-nvidia-tegra/