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curl-6 on 27 August 2023
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Biggerboat1 said:
curl-6 said:

Switch 2's specs are unconfirmed as of yet, but even if you had the raw power, portable hardware has bottlenecks in different places so the games would need some investment of resources to adapt them, like how PS3/360 games still need to be ported to Switch even though it's more capable than those consoles. 

The technology to play PS5 games on a portable without sinking a considerable resources into the conversion process doesn't exist yet, and by the time it does, Sony will be looking to move on to PS6.

Of course Sony would have to design the chip with the specific target of it being able to play PS4 games natively, so zero resources would be required to play that library on the handheld. It's not analogous to porting PS3/360 games to switch, just like PS4 games don't require porting to PS5...

Again, maybe this ain't possible, but we're talking about matching very antiquated hardware now in terms of PS4.

The steam deck is doing something similar in the PC space, and it's hardware would be easily eclipsed by a PS equivalent. 

Re. your last point about PS5 games, Ratchet & Clank was supposedly only possible via the power of the PS5 hardware, and what do you know, steam deck offers a very playable experience, and again a PS equivalent would be far more capable.

We'll see a lot of 3rd party games ported/playable to/on switch 2/steam deck (and it's likely successor), my understanding is that unreal engine 5 has a lot of tools geared towards scalability. 

It's not as easy as "just design a chip to play PS4 games natively" though, portable hardware is necessarily different from console hardware, so games built for PS4 would need to be reworked to run well on it. 

As for Ratchet on Steam Deck, that did require work; the ability to run at lower specs was a part of porting it to PC.

There will be PS5 games ported to run on Switch 2 and Steam Deck, just as there are PS4 games ported to the current Switch, but none of that comes for free, it all ties up development resources.

A new handheld would require a big investment and split Sony's resources, like what happened with PS4 and Vita.

Last edited by curl-6 - on 27 August 2023