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zeldaring on 11 September 2023
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Soundwave said:
sc94597 said:

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. 

Yes exactly. 

Saying "a Steam Deck can't even beat a PS4" is misleading. The Steam is a two way street. You're never going to see it's power fully unleashed probably because no one is going to make a game that is expressly made for the Steam Deck's hardware and really code down to the metal to optimize everything for it. Then there is performance lost with the Proton layer and all that among other factors. 

That's the price you pay to basically be a PC ... the upside is you get broad compatibility with hundreds/thousands of existing games. Which is the only way that product can work, you can't expect Valve or Lenovo or Asus to make games like Nintendo, Sony, MS, etc. and get 3rd party support like bespoke platform does. 

I mean if we talking AAA multiplatform games no one is coding down to metal those days are over with except for a very few exclusives and rockstar. the most optimization probably goes to ps5 since that's where third-party games sell the most.