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Nintendo Switch 2 performance boost to fall short of Valve's Steam Deck
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this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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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.
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.
And IIRC Nintendo doesn’t sell their consoles at a loss assuming they’ll make up the loss on licensing fees, so that’s an added incentive to pick a cost-conscious design.