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[Komatsu]

I’ve been revisiting some of the multiplatform games on the Switch lately, and while there are definitely a few gems that punch above the hardware’s weight (Doom, The Witcher 3, Nier: Automata), let us be frank—most of these ports are barely passable. Take Mutant Year Zero, for example. On PC, it’s a really solid, atmospheric game with decent textures and lighting that bring the post-apocalyptic world to life. But then you look at the Switch version, and… oof. The frame rate struggles, textures are downgraded to an extreme degree, and the resolution can dip to a point where it feels almost unplayable.

Here are two screenshots for comparison:

- PC Version:

Notice the details in the characters and environment. You can actually see the individual patches of grass. The rock textures aren't amazing but at least they are clearly delineated against the rest of the backdrop.

- Switch version:

The textures are flat, and the dynamic res is scrapping the bottom of the barrel. No idea no resolution this is running at, but likely something around 504p.

With the Steam Deck, ROG Ally and other AMD SOC-based gaming handhelds out, I simply find myself not bothering to get any multiplat on the Switch anymore. They all run - without exception - much better on the Deck, the Ally or even the Ayaneo 1+.

I know this is like the beating the deadest horse ever, but Nintendo absolutely must understand that the NSW was already long in the tooth in 2019. And Nintendo looks set to repeat this same strategy. If the leaked specs are real (eight-core Cortex-A78AE processor, 10 streaming multiprocessors, 8GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage ), we are going to be looking at similarly muddy multiplat titles in less than 2 years.

 

[LectureMaster]

I think it's obvious most Nintendo buyers know it's gonna be downgrade before they buy the multiplat games on Switch.
They are going for portability or they are casual enough to not care the graphic differences.

 

[lh032]

we all know that and the switch owners knows that too, i dont think it bothers them tbh

 

[poppabk]

 

[Ozzie666]

Makes me wonder how the next civilization will turn out, because that would be pure portable crack. Nintendo switch owners already know all this and they choose portability/gameplay over the graphic chase.
This is the way.

So many big developers have just ignored the true potential and profits of Switch. You can't tell me a great Heroes of Might and Magic wouldn't do well, or Eye of the Beholder type game from big western developers wouldn't do well. So many old PC franchises that don't rely on cutting edge graphics.

 

[Codes 208]

Man, that’s quite the room temperature take you’ve got there

 

[Komatsu]

So many big developers have just ignored the true potential and profits of Switch. You can't tell me a great Heroes of Might and Magic wouldn't do well, or Eye of the Beholder type game from big western developers wouldn't do well. So many old PC franchises that don't rely on cutting edge graphics.

I agree entirely. That said: There are already plenty of 2D and sprite-based games doing great numbers on the Switch, as well as less demanding 3D indies and A and AA titles/ But as long as the Switch remains one of the 3 major platforms, we will keep getting ports of larger, more ambitious multiplat titles and they will almost always play and look like hot garbage.

Also - the graphics vs portability debate isn't today where it was in 2017. For less than $400 you can get an AMD APU-based handheld that runs all multiplats significantly better than the Switch.

 

[Loomy]

I know this is like the beating the deadest horse ever, but Nintendo absolutely must understand that the NSW was already long in the tooth in 2019.

This has been the case since the system launched. Nintendo doesn't care, most Switch owners do not care, developers probably don't care. People buy Nintendo consoles to play Nintendo games. As long as Nintendo keeps pumping those out and they well and look good on Nintendo systems, Nintendo and most of their fans will be happy.

 

[awwr999999]

I’ve been revisiting some of the multiplatform games on the Switch lately, and while there are definitely a few gems that punch above the hardware’s weight (Doom, The Witcher 3, Nier: Automata), let us be frank—most of these ports are barely passable.

This is why MS is launching a portable. All they have to do to dominate Nintendo is launch something more powerful than the NSW2 at the same price or lower.
MS will gladly eat $100-200 per handheld for years just to sink Nintendo in the long run.
Nintendo allowing multiplat PC games onto the platform opened them up to being overtaken via the "EMBRACE, EXTEND, EXTINGUISH" strategy.

 

[DeceptiveAlarm]

Thanks op. We had no idea that switch ports run worse than pc.

 

[Danjin44]

I like my switch but I wont buy mutiplatform games for that system, the only exception is Ace Attorney games.

 

[Hrk69]

 

[Impotaku]

Let me reheat this take it's gone rather cold.

Nobody is buying switch games for the graphical prowess LOL

 

[NotMyProblemAnymoreCunt]

I like my switch but I wont buy mutiplatform games for that system, the only exception is Ace Attorney games.

When it comes to Third Parties, I tend to buy Visual Novels and JRPGs on Switch

 

[Hero_Select]

lol. ok.

 

[joeygreco1985]

Someone's been watching 2018 Digital Foundry videos

 

[Cyberpunkd]

Makes me wonder how the next civilization will turn out, because that would be pure portable crack. Nintendo switch owners already know all this and they choose portability/gameplay over the graphic chase.
This is the way.

Or just get a Steam Deck because a company is not using components outdated at launch in order to pad their profit margins?
Again - Switch ports should be called out for terrible performance. The Skywalker Saga drops into mid 20s regularly.

 

[analog_future]

I mean it's a handheld device that was underpowered when it was released 8 years ago. I don't think you're sharing anything revelatory here.

 

[James Sawyer Ford]

Going to be the same case for the Switch 2, nothing is going to change in that regard. Nintendo doesn't care about power. In fact I think people will be greatly disappointed in Switch 2 specs because Nintendo will prefer battery life.

If it has DLSS though that should greatly help for sure, and be a nice improvement over Switch 1

 

[kevboard]

it's almost like the Switch is a 393 GFLOPS GPU handheld from 2017 lol.

 

[TexMex]

We appreciate your honesty, but is this even up for debate?

 

[chakadave]

Or just get a Steam Deck because a company is not using components outdated at launch in order to pad their profit margins?
Again - Switch ports should be called out for terrible performance. The Skywalker Saga drops into mid 20s regularly.

The Deck was also outdated. It didn’t even use the latest chip on release. It’s impossible to do that as the system is released after it was designed.

What are people trying to say when they say this? As if the other consoles or any PC isn’t out of date the day after it is made.

 

[Impotaku]

This is why MS is launching a portable. All they have to do to dominate Nintendo is launch something more powerful than the NSW2 at the same price or lower.
MS will gladly eat $100-200 per handheld for years just to sink Nintendo in the long run.
Nintendo allowing multiplat PC games onto the platform opened them up to being overtaken via the "EMBRACE, EXTEND, EXTINGUISH" strategy.

I guess you weren't around when handhelds were released first, power strategy has never worked in any of the handheld generations It's the lesson nintendo learned but nobody else seems to.

Back in the gameboy era, lynx & gamegear & pce GT totally destroyed gameboy in graphical power & yet the gamebody destroyed them all.

Then came the DS and sony released the PSP which once again graphically destroyed the DS & nobody cared it got destroyed by the DS.

Then came the 3DS and sony released the vita and once again the vita had more power & yet once again it got destroyed, seeing the pattern yet?

Now we have the switch once again it's not a powerhouse, it trys to balance the line of reasonable graphics while still having a useable battery life. It's comical you saying all microsoft has to do to dominate nintendo is to release a powerful handheld console. They can't even compete in the console space & you think they are able to topple nintendo in an area they are damn experts at. Power comes at the cost and that cost is battery life, nintendo learned this decades ago. The switch is underclocked to save power you can run it faster than it does normally, the fact modders have overclocked switches to do just that but when you do it tanks the battery life which is why nintendo didn't.

 

[kevboard]

Or just get a Steam Deck because a company is not using components outdated at launch in order to pad their profit margins?
Again - Switch ports should be called out for terrible performance. The Skywalker Saga drops into mid 20s regularly.

the Deck was literally less powerful in comparison to the available mobile chipsets that existed, than the Switch was when it released.

it was basically impossible for Nintendo to get a better chip for the Switch in 2017 without completely destroying battery life (as in sub 1 hour). Meanwhile, at the day of release of the Deck, there were already more powerful Windows handhelds on the market.

The Deck is as attractive as it is purely due to the support by Valve through their custom OS, and the build quality.

 

[chakadave]

Going to be the same case for the Switch 2, nothing is going to change in that regard. Nintendo doesn't care about power. In fact I think people will be greatly disappointed in Switch 2 specs because Nintendo will prefer battery life.

If it has DLSS though that should greatly help for sure, and be a nice improvement over Switch 1

One thing for sure is the chips are more versatile. That along with DLSS means Nintendo might be able to put together an impressive package once again.

Modern rendering and graphics techniques and engine support can do a lot.

If they can down clock and overclock it when they want the Switch 2 will be great in my opinion.

 

[DeepEnigma]

You see the TotK framerates? Even Nintendo struggles at times.

 

[James Sawyer Ford]

One thing for sure is the chips are more versatile. That along with DLSS means Nintendo might be able to put together an impressive package once again.

Modern rendering and graphics techniques and engine support can do a lot.

If they can down clock and overclock it when they want the Switch 2 will be great in my opinion.

That will be the interesting thing to see. I hope that the Docked mode can go WAYYYYYYY higher than handheld and be decently powerful, but I have no real expectation that handheld mode will prioritize anything other than battery life.

Nintendo makes appealing looking games through great art on the system, so that will really shine here for Switch 2 as well. But it won't be the place to play multiplats unless you really enjoy the handheld aspect, and even then there may be better market options for raw performance.

 

[Crayon]

 

[ADiTAR]

That's why I decided not to buy anything for the next 20 years until all game's graphics are perfect 1:1 real life 240fps 24K.

 

[CS Lurker]

If the leaked specs are real (eight-core Cortex-A78AE processor, 10 streaming multiprocessors, 8GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage

These are wrong. It's 8xA78C, 12SM (1536 CUDA), 12GB LPDDR5X (120GB/s), 256GB UFS 3.1.
Also 12 RT cores and 48 Tensor Cores.

DLSS will help it a lot. Switch 2 will punch way above its weight for being a closed platform, but there will always be a limit with a handheld hardware (specially the Switch 2, that won't be as big and heavy as a Steam Deck or ROG Ally, thus having a smaller battery and going for a much lower TDP in handheld mode)

 

[Filben]

It's not even the graphics. I've played some buggy and lower-performance-than-it-should-have titles, e.g. that Witcher card-game-based story game was constantly stuttering with bad frame pacing; Commandos 3 had some serious interface bugs that went hard-coded into my save game, which couldn't be resolved by a restart; Broken Sword 5, not a spectacular title visual-wise struggles in handheld mode to maintain stable FPS, with animations visible getting less fluid the more is on the scene. Graveyard Keeper runs at 30fps, with vsync and a heavy input latency what feels more like 20fps, loads forever, and freezed a couple of times.

80% of Switch ports seem like an afterthought, following the motto "screw it, they're Switch players, they eat up anything you give them and be glad about it, to get a half-decent game between all this shovelware in this mess of a store".

 

[Unknown Soldier]

The Switch is literally about to be replaced so it's not like this matters anymore

 

[kazuyamishima]

I’m still seeing Nintendo users mentioning that Switch will see games like Baldurs Gate 3, GTA6, Alan Wake 2 and many more running on the system without any problems at more than 30fps.

Also, they keep mentioning the Witcher 3 like it’s some really impossible port, when the docked version on the switch runs very considerable worst than the PS4 version.

 

[Hero_Select]

Or just get a Steam Deck because a company is not using components outdated at launch in order to pad their profit margins?
Again - Switch ports should be called out for terrible performance. The Skywalker Saga drops into mid 20s regularly.

Nintendo can't compete the same way Sony and Microfot do, I don't know why everyone expects a super powerful handheld when it would mean an increase in price and a hit on battery life.

As successful as the Steam Deck is for Vavle, it's for their own market and it's globally available in stores.

 

[Cyberpunkd]

The Deck was also outdated. It didn’t even use the latest chip on release. It’s impossible to do that as the system is released after it was designed.

What are people trying to say when they say this? As if the other consoles or any PC isn’t out of date the day after it is made.

Skywalker Saga runs at 60FPS on the deck.

 

[kevboard]

These are wrong. It's 8xA78C, 12SM (1536 CUDA), 12GB LPDDR5X (120GB/s), 256GB UFS 3.1.
Also 12 RT cores and 48 Tensor Cores.

DLSS will help it a lot. Switch 2 will punch way above its weight for being a closed platform, but there will always be a limit with a handheld hardware (specially the Switch 2, that won't be as big and heavy as a Steam Deck or ROG Ally, thus having a smaller battery and going for a much lower TDP in handheld mode)

DLSS will do a lot of the heavy lifting.
but even so, at 1ghz GPU clock, that thing would already be at ~3 TFLOPS FP32, comparable to a mobile RTX 3050.

I absolutely hope that Nintendo will at least in docked mode push the clock speeds as high as the chip and their thermal solution allows.
and I'm not sure if it is solidly confirmed anywhere how high the T239 can clock its GPU cores.
the Tegra X1+ can go up to 1.267ghz, which would raise that to 3.9 TFLOPS, which would get us to RTX 3050ti Mobile territory.

edit:
here's what an RTX 3050 Laptop GPU can do in Forza Horizon 5 set to the Ultra preset, at native 1080p


now add DLSS to that and optimise the settings a bit as everything on ultra is probably overkill

 

[kevboard]

Skywalker Saga runs at 60FPS on the deck.

and it would run even higher if Valve used top of the line hardware, which they didn't. meanwhile Nintendo did use the best mobile chip available in 2017.

you can argue the clock speeds were chosen too low, but the hardware itself was absolutely cutting edge at the time.

 

[Shadowstar39]

I wholeheartedly disagree. Nintendo was smart. They were able to make an affordable device and take the market over. Their entry price of $300 is just right. Most people don't want to spend more on a device you can drop and break. Nintendo switch is a portable hybrid. It's also the lightweight form factor and joycons.

The switch is able to release more games in less time, spending less money. I own well over 100 switch games (physical and eshop) and they are the platform for jrpgs.

Right now I am playing stalker shadow of chernobly in my freaking hands. It plays great and at 60fps. Also the Gothic games, company of heroes and other pc games ported over.

I am also playing ys 10 and dabbling into vampire survivors and shadow of the damned. Romancing saga 2 also came out and it's in my to play list. Thr indie scene on switch is great too.

Nintendo needs to mimic it's magic. It doesn't need to compete with Sony it just needs ps4 level visuals and full cart and digital backwards compatiblity at an affordable price and they win again. I'll buy one day 1. What's crazy is the last Nintendo console I owned was the snes. They got me to come back.

 

[NotMyProblemAnymoreCunt]

I wholeheartedly disagree. Nintendo was smart. They were able to make an affordable device and take the market over. Their entry price of $300 is just right. Most people don't want to spend more on a device you can drop and break. Nintendo switch is a portable hybrid. It's also the lightweight form factor and joycons.

The switch is able to release more games in less time, spending less money. I own well over 100 switch games (physical and eshop) and they are the platform for jrpgs.

Right now I am playing stalker shadow of chernobly in my freaking hands. It plays great and at 60fps. Also the Gothic games, company of heroes and other pc games ported over.

I am also playing ys 10 and dabbling into vampire survivors and shadow of the damned. Romancing saga 2 also came out and it's in my to play list. Thr indie scene on switch is great too.

Nintendo needs to mimic it's magic. It doesn't need to compete with Sony it just needs ps4 level visuals and full cart and digital backwards compatiblity at an affordable price and they win again. I'll buy one day 1. What's crazy is the last Nintendo console I owned was the snes. They got me to come back.

Visual Novels and Puzzle Games are fantastic on it too

I've been playing so much Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 on my Switch recently

 

[Bumblebeetuna]

Woah, who knew the Switch struggles to run the same games as much more powerful platforms.

 

[nial]

The Switch is literally about to be replaced so it's not like this matters anymore

I don't know, man. I don't know if the faithful can wait yet ANOTHER year for it (yep, late 2025).
I can't believe only two years ago people actually expected it to launch alongside TOTK, lmao.

 

[CS Lurker]

DLSS will do a lot of the heavy lifting.
but even so, at 1ghz GPU clock, that thing would already be at ~3 TFLOPS FP32, comparable to a mobile RTX 3050.

I absolutely hope that Nintendo will at least in docked mode push the clock speeds as high as the chip and their thermal solution allows.
and I'm not sure if it is solidly confirmed anywhere how high the T239 can clock its GPU cores.
the Tegra X1+ can go up to 1.267ghz, which would raise that to 3.9 TFLOPS, which would get us to RTX 3050ti Mobile terretory.

I'm expecting to see more clock profiles, this time including the CPU. Something like Quest 3 does, where games that are CPU heavy can clock the CPU higher at the cost of the GPU clock, and the same for GPU heavy games.

I'm very confident in the node being TSMC 5nm, but at the same time the prototype that leaked shows that the space for the battery is very constrained (more than I thought, considering it seems to be considerable bigger than the current Switch). So, if they want 3 hours of battery life, they will have to use 7~8W for the whole console. Using the Quest 3 as an example (because I know how much power it drains, the size of the XR2 (5nm) and the clocks it uses), it seems feasible for the T239 to have 600MHz in handheld, which would give us 1.84TF. I totally expect it to have at least 2 times the GPU performance when docked, so that's 3.68 Ampere teraflops when docked. Not bad considering the total power consumption and battery life in handheld mode. But I could totally see it reaching 4~4.2TF (1.3~1.37GHz) when docked , because we know Lovelace GPU's can clock much higher before it starts to ask too much.

 

[Exede]

You buy Nintendo consoles for 1st party games not for multi platform titles.
Nintendo + 1

 

[kevboard]

I'm expecting to see more clock profiles, this time including the CPU. Something like Quest 3 does, where games that are CPU heavy can clock the CPU higher at the cost of the GPU clock, and the same for GPU heavy games.

I'm very confident in the node being TSMC 5nm, but at the same time the prototype that leaked shows that the space for the battery is very constrained (more than I thought, considering it seems to be considerable bigger than the current Switch). So, if they want 3 hours of battery life, they will have to use 7~8W for the whole console. Using the Quest 3 as an example (because I know how much power it drains, the size of the XR2 (5nm) and the clocks it uses), it seems feasible for the T239 to have 600MHz in handheld, which would give us 1.84TF. I totally expect it to have at least 2 times the GPU performance when docked, so that's 3.68 Ampere teraflops when docked. Not bad considering the total power consumption and battery life in handheld mode. But I could totally see it reaching 4~4.2TF (1.3~1.37GHz) when docked , because we know Lovelace GPU's can clock much higher before it starts to ask too much.

I really hope they really max the clock speeds in docked mode.
in handheld mode, DLSS can do a lot to make the image quality acceptable on that small screen, and in docked mode it would be great if there was enough juice to regularly get a 1080p or 900p upsampled to 1440p or 4K DLSS image.

if they reach actual RTX 3050 mobile power in docked mode, which they can, then the system can easily keep up with basically all modern games... which would kinda be wild if you think about it.
that could be a system that, at least on a subjective level, outperforms the Series S. subjectively cuz DLSS.

 

[Robb]

 

[onQ123]

 

[existensmaximum]

Is this news since 2017?

 

[Lukin1978]

In other news water is still wet

 

[pachura]

Animal Well runs fine on Switch

 

[Cakeboxer]

3rd party Switch games don't need to be eye candy, they are just a bonus. Switch owners bought the console for the great exclusive games.