The Steam Deck comparison is really silly.
1. The Steam Deck, as impressive as it is, runs games through a compatibility layer (Proton) that provides on average a 10% performance hit. Valve has done a lot toward reducing that hit in optimized titles, but basically any game they haven't fine tuned for is going to get a 10% hit on the platform versus running directly in Linux. This is a software problem, not a hardware one. If games were developed directly for Linux/Steam OS, the Steam Deck would gain a significant performance boost in many of them.
2. By the time the Switch 2 releases, the Steam deck will be almost three years old, and we'll probably be talking about an incoming Steam Deck 2 release at that point.
3. The Steam Deck has about the same power demands as a Nintendo Switch (maxing out at 15W tdp.)
4. Despite looking like one, the Steam Deck is not a closed platform. It runs games that had to be optimized for a wide-range of hardware.
A Switch 2 released on a 5nm process node is going to get efficiency gains, by the simple fact that 5nm provides about 30% performance-per-watt over 7nm. This can be utilized to reduce cooling (while giving the same performance as a Steam Deck), improve performance while requiring as much cooling, or a little bit of both.
Things often don't make sense if you don't know basic details about them.
Last edited by sc94597 - on 11 September 2023
