Topic: what is a "next-gen" Nintendo console?

Video game consoles are very different from iPhones. Next -gen consoles are completely separate from their predecessors; they are usually much more powerful (or at least have a larger increase in power compared to a new iPhone). Last-gen consoles aren’t able to run most AAA next-gen games.

@StewdaMegaManNerd I would agree with you 15 years ago. But both last gen consoles from Microsoft and Sony are technically powerful enough to run most AAA next-gen titles.

This has to do with the fact that these games are built on game engines that are very good at downscaling to lower powered hardware. It's the same reason why we got so many "impossible" ports on the Switch.

Sure you're not going to get 60fps and raytracing and ultra quality textures perhaps, but most games would actually run on last-gen hardware if developers put in the work the back porting the games.

The reason is because we are starting to reach a point with diminishing returns in terms of what performance you get from the increased horsepower.

Also, imagine that you released the Playstation 6 which could raster graphics with 4 times the number of polygons (it's just an example, I have no idea how many polygons the PS6 will be able to handle)
But imagine that it could handle 4 times the amount of polygons. How large of a visual improvement would that make. The graphics today is already super polygon dense. So even if you multiplied the number of polygons by 4 you might not actually notice much of a difference.

Yes we have reached that point. It's the same with resolution imagine that the PS6 could render games in 8k, well most people wouldn't even notice much of difference.

But these two improvement used to be really noticeable whenever we got a bump in those areas. But they are not that noticeable anymore. yet they are still extremely demanding for the hardware.

so in case of the Xbox and Playstation consoles the generational performance bumps are no longer that large that back porting games to previous generation is a big undertaking anymore. In many cases it's a trivial matter and with many people still rocking last-gen consoles in their living rooms, it might even be a good business decision to do some back porting.

The Switch -> Switch 2 situation is different though, the Tegra chip is so old that an actual big leap is actually still possible and in fact with the leaked specs it's actually happening.
Nintendo is bringing the Switch 2 to the point where it should be able to play pretty much any current Gen game (perhaps not at the PS5 level, but they'll run and look great)

The Switch 2 will play games that are technically impossible to run on the original Switch with ease.

@DaniPooo Yeah, I largely wrote my comment assuming most developers wouldn’t bother to optimize their games for both current-gen and last-gen consoles.