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Soundwave on 10 May 2024
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Chrkeller said:
Soundwave said:

Nintendo chose the higher bandwidth solution. A Switch 2 the size of a laptop is a Switch 2 that only sells 20-30 million units, Nintendo is in the business of selling 150 million systems, not a niche amount of hardware for tech nerds. 

LPDDR5X is a fantastic performance choice, it's the higher end of the two options they realistically had the chose from. Switch 2 will have more RAM than the Series S and higher bandwidth than the Steam Deck and ROG Ally ... this is a very nice compromise that still is cognizant of a having a good performing machine. Wii/DS/3DS/Wii U this definitely is not, 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM even today is something really only used in quite expensive electronics. 

Both of the following statements can be true, they are not mutually exclusive:

A) Nintendo went high end for a portable 

B) S2 will have a memory bandwidth bottleneck compared to home electronics 

C) ROG Ally runs pretty much all current gen games with slower LPDDR5 RAM. 

This is more bandwidth than a $700 ROG Ally (the higher end model). Significantly more actually. 

D) This likely also indicates a GPU that requires that extra bandwidth. A ROG Ally crushes a PS4 by being able to run many games a PS4 couldn't dream of running, so it should be asked why Nintendo needs even more bandwidth than a ROG Ally. Well it probably points to a Tegra T239 that is fairly performant. If Nintendo just wanted PS4 tier performance, you don't need LPDDR5X for that, not with even a 2022 era chip.