They’re NOT cheaper. There is exactly one cheaper PC handheld, and it’s the base model of the LCD variant of the Deck.
And the reason for that is that Valve went out of its way to sign a console maker-style large scale deal with AMD. And even then, that model of the Deck has a much worse screen, worse CPU and GPU and presumably much cheaper controls (it does ship with twice as much storage, though).
They are, as the article says, competitive in price and specs, and I’m sure some next-gen iterations of PC handhelds will outperform the Switch 2 very clearly pretty soon, let alone by the end of its life. Right now I’d say the Switch 2 has a little bit of an edge, with dedicated ports selectively cherry picking visual features, instead of having to run full fat PC ports meant for current-gen GPUs at thumbnail resolutions in potato mode.
We don’t really know this. It is possible that the CPU will be trash. Nintendo’s devices don’t really support genres that require CPU power (4X, tycoon, city-builder, RTS, MMO etc.).
While we don’t have detailed info on the Switch 2 CPU, the original Switch CPU was three generations behind at the time of the console’s release.
Best we can tell this is an embedded Ampere GPU with some ARM CPU. The Switch had a slightly weird but very functional CPU for its time. It was a quad core thing with one core reserved for the OS, which was a bit weird in a landscape where every other console could do eight threads, but the cores were clocked pretty fast by comparison.
It’s kinda weird to visualize it as a genre thing, though. I mean, Civ VII not only has a Switch 2 port, it has a Switch 1 port, too. CPU usage in gaming is a… weird and complicated thing. Unless one is a systems engineer working on the specific hardware I wouldn’t make too many assumptions about how these things go.
If you primarily play CPU bound strategy games, you can very much make conclusive statements about CPU performance. For example, Cities in Motion 1 (from the studio that created Cities: Skylines), released in 2010, can bring a modern CPU to its knees if you use modded maps, free look and say a 1440p monitor (the graphics don’t actually matter). Even a simple looking game like The Final Earth 2 can bring your FPS to a crawl due to CPU bottlenecks (even modern CPUs) in the late game with large maps. I will note that The Final Earth 2 has an Android version, but that doesn’t mean the game (which I’ve played on Android) isn’t fundamentally limited by CPU performance.
It very much is a genre thing. Can you show me a game like Transport Fever 2 on the Switch? Cities: Skylines?
The OG switch CPU was completely outdated when released and provides extremely poor performance.
The switch was released in 2017. It’s CPU, the cortex A57, was released in 2012. It was three generation behind the cortex A75 that was released in 2017.
The Switch CPU had very poor performance for 2017, it was 3 generations behind then current ARM/cortex releases.
It is very likely the CPU in the Switch 2 will also be subpar by modern standards.
I.e. You don’t know that the Steam Deck has a worse CPU and considering Nintendo’s history with CPUs, it is not impossible for the Switch 2 CPU to be noticeably worse than the Steam Deck.
What “standards” are you comparing it to? The Switch 1 was behind home consoles, but that’s not really a fair comparison. There was nothing similar on the market to appropriately compare it to, no “standard”.
Five years later the Steam Deck outperformed the Switch, because of course hardware from five years later would. But the gap between the 2017 Switch and 2022 Deck is not so vast that you can definitively claim in advance to know that the 2025 Switch 2 definitely has to be worse. You don’t know that and can’t go claiming it as fact.
All we know so far is that the Switch 2 does beat the Deck in at least one major attribute: it has a 1080p120 screen, in contrast to the Deck’s 800p60. And it is not unlikely to expect the rest of the hardware to reflect that.
Nobody was complaining about the Switch CPU. It was a pretty solid choice for the time. It outperformed the Xbox 360 somewhat, which is really all it needed to do to support last-gen ports. Like I said, the big annoyance that was specifically CPU-related from a dev perspective was the low thread count, which made cramming previous-gen multithreaded stuff into a fraction of the threads a bit of a mess.
The point of a console CPU is to run games, it’s not raw compute. The Switch had what it needed for the scope of games it was running. On a handheld you also want it to be power efficient, which it was. In fact, the Switch didn’t overclock the CPU on docked, just the GPU. Because it didn’t need it. And we now know it did have some headroom to run faster, jailbroken Switches can be reliably clocked up a fair amount. Nintendo locked it that low because they found it was the right balance of power consumption and speed to support the rest of the components.
Memory bandwidth ended up being much more of a bottleneck on it. For a lot of the games you wanted to make on a Switch the CPU was not the limit you were bumping into. The memory and the GPU were more likely to be slowing you down before CPU cycles did.
They’re NOT cheaper. There is exactly one cheaper PC handheld, and it’s the base model of the LCD variant of the Deck.
And the reason for that is that Valve went out of its way to sign a console maker-style large scale deal with AMD. And even then, that model of the Deck has a much worse screen, worse CPU and GPU and presumably much cheaper controls (it does ship with twice as much storage, though).
They are, as the article says, competitive in price and specs, and I’m sure some next-gen iterations of PC handhelds will outperform the Switch 2 very clearly pretty soon, let alone by the end of its life. Right now I’d say the Switch 2 has a little bit of an edge, with dedicated ports selectively cherry picking visual features, instead of having to run full fat PC ports meant for current-gen GPUs at thumbnail resolutions in potato mode.
We don’t really know this. It is possible that the CPU will be trash. Nintendo’s devices don’t really support genres that require CPU power (4X, tycoon, city-builder, RTS, MMO etc.).
While we don’t have detailed info on the Switch 2 CPU, the original Switch CPU was three generations behind at the time of the console’s release.
Best we can tell this is an embedded Ampere GPU with some ARM CPU. The Switch had a slightly weird but very functional CPU for its time. It was a quad core thing with one core reserved for the OS, which was a bit weird in a landscape where every other console could do eight threads, but the cores were clocked pretty fast by comparison.
It’s kinda weird to visualize it as a genre thing, though. I mean, Civ VII not only has a Switch 2 port, it has a Switch 1 port, too. CPU usage in gaming is a… weird and complicated thing. Unless one is a systems engineer working on the specific hardware I wouldn’t make too many assumptions about how these things go.
If you primarily play CPU bound strategy games, you can very much make conclusive statements about CPU performance. For example, Cities in Motion 1 (from the studio that created Cities: Skylines), released in 2010, can bring a modern CPU to its knees if you use modded maps, free look and say a 1440p monitor (the graphics don’t actually matter). Even a simple looking game like The Final Earth 2 can bring your FPS to a crawl due to CPU bottlenecks (even modern CPUs) in the late game with large maps. I will note that The Final Earth 2 has an Android version, but that doesn’t mean the game (which I’ve played on Android) isn’t fundamentally limited by CPU performance.
It very much is a genre thing. Can you show me a game like Transport Fever 2 on the Switch? Cities: Skylines?
The OG switch CPU was completely outdated when released and provides extremely poor performance.
The switch was released in 2017. It’s CPU, the cortex A57, was released in 2012. It was three generation behind the cortex A75 that was released in 2017.
I mean…
https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/cities-skylines-nintendo-switch-edition-switch/
So you’re saying it’s identical to the PC version in terms of scope and capabilities?
Have you ever played Cities: Skylines on PC?
And claiming that the Cortex A57 was a capable CPU in 2017 is not serious.
Well, it runs like crap, for sure, but that’s not the bar that you set here.
Now that I think about it, what are you saying? Your point seems a bit muddled.
The Switch CPU had very poor performance for 2017, it was 3 generations behind then current ARM/cortex releases.
It is very likely the CPU in the Switch 2 will also be subpar by modern standards.
I.e. You don’t know that the Steam Deck has a worse CPU and considering Nintendo’s history with CPUs, it is not impossible for the Switch 2 CPU to be noticeably worse than the Steam Deck.
What “standards” are you comparing it to? The Switch 1 was behind home consoles, but that’s not really a fair comparison. There was nothing similar on the market to appropriately compare it to, no “standard”.
Five years later the Steam Deck outperformed the Switch, because of course hardware from five years later would. But the gap between the 2017 Switch and 2022 Deck is not so vast that you can definitively claim in advance to know that the 2025 Switch 2 definitely has to be worse. You don’t know that and can’t go claiming it as fact.
All we know so far is that the Switch 2 does beat the Deck in at least one major attribute: it has a 1080p120 screen, in contrast to the Deck’s 800p60. And it is not unlikely to expect the rest of the hardware to reflect that.
What is “par” here?
Nobody was complaining about the Switch CPU. It was a pretty solid choice for the time. It outperformed the Xbox 360 somewhat, which is really all it needed to do to support last-gen ports. Like I said, the big annoyance that was specifically CPU-related from a dev perspective was the low thread count, which made cramming previous-gen multithreaded stuff into a fraction of the threads a bit of a mess.
The point of a console CPU is to run games, it’s not raw compute. The Switch had what it needed for the scope of games it was running. On a handheld you also want it to be power efficient, which it was. In fact, the Switch didn’t overclock the CPU on docked, just the GPU. Because it didn’t need it. And we now know it did have some headroom to run faster, jailbroken Switches can be reliably clocked up a fair amount. Nintendo locked it that low because they found it was the right balance of power consumption and speed to support the rest of the components.
Memory bandwidth ended up being much more of a bottleneck on it. For a lot of the games you wanted to make on a Switch the CPU was not the limit you were bumping into. The memory and the GPU were more likely to be slowing you down before CPU cycles did.