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curl-6 on 20 July 2019
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Soundwave said:
curl-6 said:

All of that is in theory though. A smaller fab process means the potential for better performance, but honestly, it's not really a big enough boost to be worth selling the system as a "Pro" on, especially when better battery life is a better selling point for a device like Switch. 

Honestly, I think you greatly overestimate the importance of power when it comes to the Switch. People aren't buying it for its graphics. 

I mean in portable mode being able to double the performance potentially is pretty large. We'll see how that goes. 

Switch isn't driven by graphics per se, but it also is not the Game Boy or Wii where it's like "the graphics suck ass and are 10 years outdated but it doesn't matter one bit!" type of deal either. It's some where in between those two extremes.

Part of the appeal is that it can approximate large modern scale gaming experiences like BOTW, Xenoblade, DOOM, Skyrim, Dragon Quest XI, The Witcher III, Mortal Kombat, FIFA, NBA 2K, and be able to take that experience anywhere. You don't want that gap growing too large I think, when it gets to other systems being two full generations ahead you lose that aspect of the appeal and it kinda just becomes a glorified 3DS at that point. 

Would it really be able to double performance though? The increase in battery life doesn't seem to suggest quite that big a leap. According to Nintendo's claims the improvement varies wildly from 80% (2.5 to 4.5 hours) to 38%. (6.5 to 9 hours) 

There's actually already a GPU "boost mode" of sorts for the standard Switch which jacks clockspeed up to 460MHz in portable mode at the expense of battery life, but so far the only games to use it are Mario Odyssey, BOTW, and Mortal Kombat 11. Perhaps with the greater longevity of the new model, this mode will become more widely used, so there is that.

Last edited by curl-6 - on 20 July 2019