@OmnitronVariant From another perspective: I have all consoles and a gaming PC…and my Switch 2 makes me not want to touch them. Having basically every game I want on a hybrid system is fantastic. I’m having a hell of a time replaying FF7 Remake on Switch 2 atm. And this direct has made me confident that third parties will continue to deliver.
@BonzoBanana Honestly, there are lies, damn lies and synthetic benchmarks.
Most phones, tablets and computers can boost their clock speeds for a short time and the benchmark results will invariably reflect those boosted clocks rather than the ones that they can sustain in the long term, while the Switch 2 has a fixed clock speed that's probably a lot closer to the one that they can maintain, at least for the mobile devices.
That's what you want in a device that has to deliver consistent performance for hours on end, so it makes sense to design it that way. If there's ever a need for a different trade-off, they can add other performance modes like they did with the Switch. However, for the fast majority of games it'll be the GPU that's the likely bottleneck.
It would feel like madness to pay extra for cutdown versions of the same game running on Switch 2.
It's not madness if you can't or don't want to sit in front of your telly all the time, and prefer the ability to play games on the same system while at the television, in bed, commuting on a bus or train, in a hotel room, etc. That's literally the main selling point of the Switch. For those of us who prefer this flexibility, some visual compromises are an acceptable trade-off for the ability to play anywhere. I have a pretty decent gaming PC which is able to run most games with PS5 level graphics, but if a game has a good enough Switch port, I'll buy that instead of the PC version.
@Polvasti I think some fail to realise the “better version” of a game isn’t an objective truth.
To some degree, I’ll happy take a graphically inferior game if I can play it on my preferred platform (Switch 2). Being able to just hop into the game at any time is so valuable to me.
That’s not to say I won’t choose other platforms if the compromise is too much…but so far it seems that Switch 2 is narrowing the graphics gap quite a bit.
I recently took my Switch 2 on a two week camping holiday. That's not really an option for something like a PS5. It's those extra opportunities to play that make the difference.
Obviously, there are other devices that let you play games on the go - phones, tablets, PC handhelds, laptops, etc. - but they've all got their limitations. I don't think there's a clear better alternative, at least not for me.
@BonzoBanana Honestly, there are lies, damn lies and synthetic benchmarks.
Most phones, tablets and computers can boost their clock speeds for a short time and the benchmark results will invariably reflect those boosted clocks rather than the ones that they can sustain in the long term, while the Switch 2 has a fixed clock speed that's probably a lot closer to the one that they can maintain, at least for the mobile devices.
That's what you want in a device that has to deliver consistent performance for hours on end, so it makes sense to design it that way. If there's ever a need for a different trade-off, they can add other performance modes like they did with the Switch. However, for the fast majority of games it'll be the GPU that's the likely bottleneck.
Even the original Switch with the Mariko chipset will happily run its ARM processors at 2Ghz and maintain that speed but the big cost is battery runtime if portable and fan noise maybe. The Switch 2 is on a mainly 10Nm fabrication so it will run hotter than many other devices which are on 4, 5 or 6Nm nodes. However with that said I totally accept portable devices can have thermal issues and drop speed often due to lack of active cooling. Tablets fare better than phones because more surface area to dissipate heat too. I have a Razer Edge and that has A78s at 2.4Ghz as is its secondary CPUs and no problem maintaining that speed but then actively cooled and its X1 CPU runs at 3Ghz which is as powerful as many x86 CPUs by Mhz. It's basically a Snapdragon 888+ but with active cooling rather than passive cooling so its about 30% faster if I remember rightly and offers more consistent performance. It scores about 4000 on the passmark CPU test, twice that of the Switch 2. That chip is on a 5Nm fabrication process which is the recommended best node for Arm A78s when they first came out and what their performance figures are based on. The Razer Edge definitely gets more active cooling when you are running graphic intensive stuff. It has about 1.4 Teraflops of GPU performance and the fan ramps up when you use it fairly quickly but no noticeable drop in performance over time. This is definitely not true of the standard Snapdragon 888+ without active cooling which drops performance to lower temperatures because I remember reading that in a review.
It would feel like madness to pay extra for cutdown versions of the same game running on Switch 2.
It's not madness if you can't or don't want to sit in front of your telly all the time, and prefer the ability to play games on the same system while at the television, in bed, commuting on a bus or train, in a hotel room, etc. That's literally the main selling point of the Switch. For those of us who prefer this flexibility, some visual compromises are an acceptable trade-off for the ability to play anywhere. I have a pretty decent gaming PC which is able to run most games with PS5 level graphics, but if a game has a good enough Switch port, I'll buy that instead of the PC version.
To be honest I totally agree with this and that is why I bought an original Switch in addition to the amazing Switch exclusive games. My point is Nintendo could have raised CPU performance with very little cost same as the original Switch. It just annoys me that it has that capacity already built it really just needed a slightly larger capacity battery which probably would only have been 40-60 cents more to offer the same battery runtime. Nintendo can be a bit too cheap sometimes in what they will pay for their devices. Many of the issues in Switch 2 games would be solved with just a bit more CPU power and a bigger battery .
It's like the lack of overdrive for the display panel. The panel has a 120Hz mode so needs to change each pixel in 8.3ms or less to generate a good 120fps image. Actual pixel response time 20-30ms if you take the middle figure 25ms that is 3x longer than it should be. If the panel is sold as 120Hz then surely with overdrive it can operate at close to or even quicker than 8.3ms pixel response time. The complete absence of overdrive surely means they didn't want to lower battery runtime but maybe they should have budgeted for a slightly bigger battery in the first place so CPU clocks could be higher and the display panel properly driven. It could have been a much better console if just a tiny bit more money was spent on the bill of materials. It's still an excellent portable console but more compromised than it should have been.
On what basis are you assuming that a "bigger battery" would only cost less than an extra dollar? All else being equal, the only way to get 10% more battery capacity is by including 10% more battery. . . which is going to cost 10% more price for components. Only its not even that simple, because a 10% bigger battery is also going to require 10% more space. . . because the battery itself is bigger. Only its not even that simple, since if you are using that capacity to run the chips faster, your also going to need proportionately more cooling, which eats up both battery life and space.
Basically, your suggested "easy minor changes" aren't anything of the sort. They would result in a device that is significantly larger and more expensive. And that's assuming a very minor increase in processor speed, that might not make any substantial real life difference to the end user.
@BonzoBanana
On what basis are you assuming that a "bigger battery" would only cost less than an extra dollar? All else being equal, the only way to get 10% more battery capacity is by including 10% more battery. . . which is going to cost 10% more price for components. Only its not even that simple, because a 10% bigger battery is also going to require 10% more space. . . because the battery itself is bigger. Only its not even that simple, since if you are using that capacity to run the chips faster, your also going to need proportionately more cooling, which eats up both battery life and space.
Basically, your suggested "easy minor changes" aren't anything of the sort. They would result in a device that is significantly larger and more expensive. And that's assuming a very minor increase in processor speed, that might not make any substantial real life difference to the end user.
Remember you get cheap phones with more battery capacity than Switch 2 and people have already put larger batteries in Switch 2 as a mod, there is space. Cheap Celeron laptops come with 40Wh batteries, I know because I have one and get up 18hrs runtime out of it. A replacement for it, is less than £10 from aliexpress and that is over double the capacity of the Switch 2 battery. Lithium batteries aren't super expensive. I would think a capacity of around 27Wh would allow Switch 2 to have overdrive on its LCD panel and run its ARM cores at maybe 1.7Ghz-2Ghz with the same runtime. That's a 30% increase in capacity obviously a lower increase would decrease some of the benefits. You might only get overdrive with a smaller CPU increase etc. The point is a small increase in battery capacity could have massively improved the display panel and CPU processing of the Switch 2. Some of the technology in Switch 2 is rubbish and un-necessary like the mouse mode to me. I would happily sacrifice that to have a better performance. I had a cheap tablet back along with a crappy Unisoc chipset at 12Nm and it cost £40. They put in a large capacity 7200mAh to compensate for the chipset and you could get good runtime out of it. That is 2200mAh over the Switch 2 battery thereabout so almost a 50% increase in capacity. It was a 10" tablet but very thin 7-9mm. The Switch 2 is more inline currently with the battery capacity of smartphones and tablets than other gaming handhelds like Steam Deck which start at 40Wh and go up to maybe 70Wh. Really it should have come with 30Wh as standard.
If you would be so kind as to supply the dimensions and weight of this laptop battery? Because call me skeptical, but I am rather dubious that the battery contained within a far bigger and heavier laptop is going to have the right size to be relevant in discussion off the Switch 2.
@metaphysician Also what is that laptop doing? Running Star Wars Outlaws?
If its a "cheap Celeron", something makes me doubt it. Which is another thing people need to keep in mind: the Switch 2 chips are probably already optimized about as hard as they can go for Flops/wH, or whatever other measurement of processor power per unit energy you wish to use. Hence why I did not even bring up the idea of "more efficient chip", because until and unless there is a die shrink, there ain't going to be such a chip. Whereas a laptop isn't as optimized for efficiency, precisely because its bigger and thus can operate using a less efficient chip ( because it has the physical space for a bigger battery and more cooling ).
You can probably play a lot more games than you think on a cheap laptop if it's modern enough. Still, the bottlenecks almost certainly aren't going to be with the CPU performance. It's more likely to be the cheap integrated GPU and Intel's drivers being a bit of a lottery when it comes to compatibility.
Anyway, we're about to get a Switch 2 port of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which is a game that's generally considered to be one of the most demanding games on PC and the bane of craptop gaming, mainly because of the demands it places on the GPU.
Maybe it'll turn out to be a dud yet, but the fact that Microsoft are even attempting it, seems suggestive that the Switch 2 has the balance right, with CPU performance that's merely good enough, rather than cranking the clock speeds up to the max that the hardware could handle. I'd struggle to think of any major games these days that need a really good CPU but can run on pretty much any GPU, in contrast.
Modern game engines tend to be a lot better than they used to be at utilizing multi-core architectures and also offering scalability, by allowing CPU-intensive tasks to be reduced or turned-off entirely. It's a bit of extra work for the developers but still potentially worth it, if they can bring their games to a new audience.
@Matt_Barber
And they got the file size small enough to fit on an actual cartridge. The PC file size is well north of 100 gigs. And it’s the only game from that Bethesda slate of games to get a real physical.
@BonzoBanana
If you would be so kind as to supply the dimensions and weight of this laptop battery? Because call me skeptical, but I am rather dubious that the battery contained within a far bigger and heavier laptop is going to have the right size to be relevant in discussion off the Switch 2.
It's a tiny laptop that weighs less than 1kg and the battery is small less than the size of the battery in some tablets plus of course I'm not suggesting the Switch 2 goes for a 42Wh battery like this more like 27-30Wh would be ideal so surface area would be about 2/3rds of the area. I don't think the area is that important though as you get smartphones with more capacity than Switch 2, my point was about the cost of lithium ion batteries like this. The factory door price is much lower than the retail price we would pay. If you can retail a tablet at £60 with a larger battery its not going to be the big ticket item in the bill of materials, that is going to be the Nvidia chipset, the memory and storage (especially now) and the display panel.
@metaphysician Also what is that laptop doing? Running Star Wars Outlaws?
While the laptop has CPU performance to match Switch 2 it only has 4GB of memory and a GPU around 120-130 Gflops. So GPU wise it probably sits between the real world performance of Switch 1 in portable mode and the wii u at 174 Gflops. I do run emulators on it and the vast majority of Gamecube games run at full speed and that is its limit I guess. For actual PC games probably the most ambitious game it can run at a good speed and that is with a few hacks and careful choice of settings is Skyrim but we are talking 720x480p graphics, low settings and potato patches that drop texture quality a bit. It also has a 40hz display panel mode that helps with games. You can game on it for 4-6hrs, I guess a minimum of 4 hours for the most ambitious games. However it will do light tasks i.e. browsing for up to 18hrs on economy settings. It's meant to be 16hrs but with Windows debloated it actually lasts a couple hours longer. It's based on the Celeron N4120.
Mine doesn't score that though as its passively cooled and only has single channel memory its more like 2000-2100. Also I think mine may have 2133 DDR4 memory rather than the maximum 2400.
Lets also not forget if the Switch 2 had a 27-30Wh battery that extra capacity also means the Switch 2 discharge would likely reduce significantly in relation to the battery capacity. This would extend life of the battery and produce less heat in the same way that if you have an ebike with a smaller capacity battery they burn through their recharge cycles more quickly and don't last as long because the discharge rate is much higher so more battery capacity would reduce heat build up and extend the life of the battery pack if the battery capacity increase also increased battery runtime as well.
cough Setting aside that the product link you provided is irksome, in that it refuses to provide actual physical parameters for the battery. . . I'm going to stick to pointing out that "under one kilogram" still places your 'tiny' ( and otherwise unspecced ) laptop as being almost twice as big as the Switch 2.
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Topic: Is The Switch 2 Worth It???
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