Rab said:
Captain_Yuri said:
I was talking about this the other day in the PC thread and had a wild idea. I'll post that here:
One thing I will say is after seeing the Steam Deck, it will be interesting to see if Nintendo goes AMD and x86 instead of going Nvidia and Arm at some point in the future.
The benefit would certainly be that it will be even easier to port games over to the switch and x86 is getting to the point where the power efficiency is good enough. And considering the Volumes Nintendo is able to sell their products vs someone like Valve, I am sure they would get a bigger discount than what Valve is getting with their Steam Deck.
Even if the Switch 2 has Zen 2 + RDNA 2 specs similar to the Steam Deck, it would be quite powerful as we have seen the Steam Deck being able to run Ghostrunner with Max settings + Ray Tracing at above 30fps. With the low level API and optimizations you can do on a console, they can get even more juice out of it while having decent battery life. Of course the problem would be that whatever Gimmick Nintendo would plan would sink into the cost. So that would probably be the biggest issue unless they want to sell the Switch 2 for $400. |
Nintendo has a supply agreement with Nvidia spanning 10 years, having Nvidia hardware and enhancements like DLSS (2.0, 3.0) available gives Nintendo a significant advantage over Valve/Sony/Microsoft in the price to performance equation |
That's interesting as I wasn't aware of any exclusive supply agreements. While DLSS would allow the Switch to have pretty impressive performance, the question I have is whether or not going x86 with AMD would allow third parties that wouldn't typically port games to the switch to port games to the switch. Obviously Arm + Nvidia already should equal pretty easy porting job but would x86 with AMD make it even easier for someone like Rockstar to port over the next GTA for example? Or would someone like Rockstar not care at all whether or not the next Switch has Nvidia or x86 + AMD and won't port the games regardless.
