Did he frame it as speculation on his part, or did he state that with complete certainty?
His discussion around pricing (believes it’ll be $399) sounded like speculation. His answer on power sounded definitive
I think that section of the video is worth seeing in full, for the whole nuance. I think some people are taking him to refer to the Steam Deck when he was referring to the Series S in one place. Here is a lightly edited transcript, emphasis mine
Rich: We've already covered the concept of basically transferring Series S performance into a handheld. It can't be done for a long, long, time.
This is just fact. Worth noting that the question is asking about a "console priced $399" device. I'm sure someone is going to make a 10 pound, handcrafted Series S handheld one day, but that's obviously not what Rich is taking about
However when you're looking at Switch 2, you're looking at a very different type of device which is an Nvidia powered machine which is built on a very, very different architecture. That has ray tracing support hardware built into it, you know, it should scale quite nicely. It's got DLSS which means that um you can render from much lower resolutions and it will still look decent. So yeah I don't buy this concept that it's going to be more powerful than a Steam Deck or even you know close to Series S it's just not going to happen,
Rich is speaking from his own benchmarks, and I think he's completely right. AMD has that huge raster advantage, and overcoming it on Drake would take a handheld clock somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 Mhz for Steam Deck and a 1.7GHz docked close for a Series S. It's just not feasible. But r
but it shouldn't need to, because you'll be getting bespoke ports built to the quality level afforded by the hardware capabilities of the Switch 2. And if you look at what the Switch 1 did in comparison to the to the, you know, the poverty nature of the specification that it had I think it was a triumph, and I expect to see the same thing happening with Switch 2.
Yeah, but who cares if the games look just as good, or arguably better. Oliver follows up
Oliver: Yeah I think with the Super Switch - or Switch 2, or whatever you want to call it - I wouldn't think of it as like a static quantity.
This is a point that a lot of folks don't always see - AMD/ATI's technology has dominated the console space for so long, you really could think of consoles as one number and compare them, when it came to performance. Switch upended that - not only was it Nvidia tech instead of AMD, it was also solid state storage while the other consoles were spinning hard drives. That matters.
I would say the raw rendering power is one thing, and we could say that's maybe roughly in the ballpark of last gen consoles.
Just a reminder that the Xbox One was 1.3 TFLOPS and the One X was 6 TFLOPS. That's a big ballpark.
Then you have storage, the CPU, the GPU features
Oliver isn't just talking about DLSS and RT here, or even mesh shaders. The full DX12 Suite is basically defined by "what is in the current Xbox console" but DirectX is adding machine learning capabilities in prep for the
next Xbox console, and Nvidia already has it
and those are all ahead of last gen consoles to some degree or another and might be able to be exploited to some degree depending on the game and that might let it punch up above its weight. But it will depend on the game. It might be viable for some titles targeting certain resolutions, may not be viable for others when it comes to technologies like DLSS for instance.
Yeah, this is another thing that AMD's dominance of consoles makes it hard to see - some games really favor these technologies, some don't. There isn't one number tha
So I would say, like, is it more powerful, is it as powerful as a series S? I don't think those combinations of technologies will allow it to be as powerful as the series S, I really doubt that. But could it punch above its weight, could it achieve a better result than a steam deck? Sure but, I wouldn't call that being more powerful necessarily I would just say it's using its power differently, sort of, that's how I would think
I might disagree a little with Oliver here, as I think Series S lookalikes are more achievable than he thinks, but as we've discussed, the questions about "what mode are we talking about" can make this conversation tricky. On to Alex
Alex: Absolutely, that's all I would say too, like, it's going to be using different technologies to achieve its results than what a series s would have. And itt's also going to have extremely different - you know Steam Deck has a limited battery life, the OLED is better at this, but I think Switch is going to be targeting better battery life than even a steam deck OLED.
This is an important point - they're speculating slightly based on the idea that Nintendo wants a sane battery life for this thing. You know, maybe Nintendo really could crank this chip up to 11 and deliver steam deck power + nvidia tech, but Nintendo doesn't want a "handheld" you can play for only an hour. And that's a good thing!
like how long you can play a game for - I presume based on the the OG Switch. So it's constraints are different, and you have to balance that always into the equation like the power is not the only thing that matters and it's more about the experiences it allows and also how how long can I actually play this thing while uh jetting across the Atlantic or Pacific
As someone who leaves his Steam Deck behind while travelling, this is a big one to me. I would prefer that extra 20% battery life and a slightly lighter, smaller device over that extra 20% of performance.
. I think it can really shake up the discussion.
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