6d ago

Steam does what Nintendoes and Nintendon't

292 comments

We already know that the steamdeck plays switch games better than the switch. It would be hilarious if it also plays switch2 games better than the switch2.
- Maybe not all games, but the two Zelda games run better on emulator than they do on Switch.
  
  Metroid dread runs pretty great on Deck, too! But last I checked Mario odyssey is something like 10fps, same with the mario galaxy switch port 😢
  
  I've been trying to play totk on my steam deck cuz im not shelling out 70 bucks for a game and it runs at like 20 fps. How are you getting it running playably
  
  I'll look into it when I get a chance, I don't remember the details, but it went pretty smoothly for me.
  
  I made my statement based on popular opinion. I don't have personal experience with it.
- It definitely won't play Switch 2 games better. The hardware is roughly in the same ballpark performance wise, but the steam deck needs to emulate Switch 2 games.
  Please, you can argue all you want against Nintendo, but just straight up lying really doesn't help.
  
  Steam link to a desktop running an emulator though?
  Is there even much competition between them though, I would have thought people considering one wouldn't even think of the other.
- If the switch 2s hardware isn't better than the Deck, then of course it will.
  
  Do we know what the switch2's hardware is yet?
  
  If the leaks are correct its:
  Full specs:
  
  CPU: Arm Cortex-A78C 8 cores Unknown L1/L2/L3 cache sizes GPU: Nvidia T239 Ampere 1 Graphics Processing Cluster (GPC) 12 Streaming Multiprocessors (SM) 1534 CUDA cores 6 Texture Processing Clusters (TPC) 48 Gen 3 Tensor cores 2 RTX ray-tracing cores RAM: 12 GB LPDDR5
  Handheld Mode:
  
  CPU: 998.4 MHz GPU: 561 MHz (~1.72 TFLOPS) Memory Frequency: 4266 MHz Memory Bandwidth: 68.256 GB/s
  Docked Mode:
  
  CPU: 1100.8 MHz GPU: 1007.25 MHz (~3.09 TFLOPS) Memory Frequency: 6400 MHz Memory Bandwidth: 102.4 GB/s
  I personally don't know how that compares to other hardware though.
  (Edit: Thanks for the replies!)
  
  Here's the OLED Deck specs for comparison:
  APU
  6 nm AMD APU
  APU power: 4-15W
  (which contains:)
  CPU:
  Zen 2 4c/8t, 2.4-3.5GHz
  (up to 448 GFlops FP32)
  GPU:
  8 RDNA 2 CUs, 1.6GHz
  (1.6 TFlops FP32)
  ...
  RAM:
  16 GB LPDDR5 on-board RAM
  (6400 MT/s quad 32-bit channels)
  Storage:
  Steam Deck 512GB NVMe SSD
  Steam Deck 1TB NVMe SSD
  Both include high-speed microSD card slot
  EDIT: More details
  https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Steam-Deck-OLED-APU-Processor-Benchmarks-and-Specs.799065.0.html
  So basically, the Deck and Switch 2 are roughly inverted in compartitive hardware power... the Deck has a more powerful CPU, the Switch 2 has a more powerful GPU.
  EDIT 2:
  also the Deck has 33% more RAM.
  
  Consoles can also do more with less since the games are (unless they're shitty ports) designed for that specific hardware.
  
  Yep, this is always a factor, even with PC games.
  For example: the Switch 2 uses an ARM CPU.
  That is different in significant ways than an x86/64 CPU.
  How the system allocates memory is also... a confounding factor.
  Sometimes you have just one kind of RAM shared between the CPU and GPU. Sometimes there are different kinds of RAM for the CPU and GPU.
  It looks like the Switch 2 is sharing LPPDR5 RAM between the CPU and GPU, as the Deck does... on the Deck, you can use CryoUtils to manually adjust how much is allocated to which.
  The Switch 2 will... maybe have a standardized allocation for all games, or allow certain games to adjust the allocation.
  And then if course there is port quality, and proton...
  It gets pretty complicated to estimate just purely from specs alone.
  Hence why the PC centric crowd is so much into empirical testing via benchmarks.
  
  That low ram is going to hurt the new switch pretty quickly, I think. I wouldn't get a newish pc/laptop if it didn't have at least 16g ram these days. They're going to struggle again with ports.
  
  core count x clock speed hasn't been a good metric for about 15-20 years, but if we go by that anyway then it looks like the switch2 will be slightly worse than a steam deck.

292 comments