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tsogud on 16 July 2021
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curl-6 said:
tsogud said:

What you're saying doesn't make a lot of sense especially considering this past gen and how modern games are extremely scalable. PS4 Pro and Xbox One X didn't fracture their userbase and cause games on their base model to be poorly optimized. Including Switch and PC there were six profiles third party developers worked on and no evidence suggests that just because of Pro/One X existing, the OG model versions of games suffered. I had a PS4 slim all gen and had no need to upgrade to pro, the games that ran on the slim would've ran that way with or without a pro and the Sony games I played ran fine. And there were no Pro and One X exclusives.

If there's a "pro" variant of Switch you can carry on like you have been doing not caring about performance and play Link's Awakening and Age of Calamity in all it's stuttery and frame dropping glory. But for the people for which that unstable performance of such games effects the enjoyment of, the "pro" variant would be for them.

After the Pro and X came out last gen lower resolutions became more common on the base models, and look no further than Cyberpunk for a game that clearly wasn't optimized for the 2013 consoles, or Hyrule Warriors on 3DS were the base model was 20fps and it only ran okay on the New model. And the New 3DS did have games not on the base model at all; Xenoblade, FE Warriors, Minecraft, Binding of Isaac, even the SNES virtual console.

Just as you're free to "carry on" about the current Switch's performance level, I'm free to "carry on" here and now that it's satisfactory to me personally. I'm playing through Astral Chain on it now for instance and it looks and runs just fine. Clearly most folks are happy with the current model given its flying off shelves at $300 more than four years after its release.

There's no actual hard evidence to attribute lower resolution, poor performance, and/or poor optimization on some games to the Pro/X's mere existence as you previously suggested. Different hardware profiles will provide different user experiences, a more powerful machine will provide a more stable experience with the exact same game. The more powerful hardware isn't the cause of poor performance of software on the lower spec hardware, just that it can run the software more efficiently than the lower spec hardware can.

Hyrule Warriors ran meh on both models, though as mentioned it was better on New 3ds purely because it was more powerful, but both suffered due to limitations. Even though the New 3ds had exclusives it was very few (about 10) and didn't fracture the userbase as an overwhelming majority of 3ds games were developed for the OG model as a base throughout the 3ds lifespan. Kinda off topic but the New 3ds is an example of a useless hardware "upgrade" honestly. The OG model could handle and run the newer 3ds games released at that time at stable/acceptable performances and the hardware was improved very minimally to a point where only like 5 games outside the exclusives benefited from it and even then the benefits were small. Also you can pay for something and later not be happy about it or wish the product you paid for was at least somewhat more polished. Sales don't translate 1:1 with customer satisfaction as the latter isn't so cut and dry.

If a pro comes to fruition there is no gaurantee that there will be exclusives. If it does happen and there's no exclusives like with the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X, and the only big difference from OLED Switch would be improved hardware that significantly improves the performance and resolution of a lot of games would you buy it? Or at least would you consider it?