| numberwang said: I am skeptical of claims that put Switch 2 performance above the Steam Deck in handheld mode. The Switch 2 SOC is slightly larger with ca. 210mm² compared to Steam Deck 163mm² at the original TSMC at 7N process. With a Samsung 8N node that would mean fewer transistors for the Switch 2. Samsung 5N should give Switch 2 more transistors. Clock speed on Switch 2 is much lower to accommodate 10W power and a longer battery life. Switch 2 die size: 210mm² Steam Deck die size: 163mm² Switch 2 GPU Hz handheld: 561MHz Steam Deck GPU Hz: 1600Mhz Switch 2 TFlops: ? Steam Deck Tflops: 1.6 TFlops
The [original Steam Deck] Van Gogh graphics processor is an average sized chip with a die area of 163 mm² and 2,400 million transistors. |
TFLOPs are a function of clock-frequency and core-count. Both of those are knowns now. The node isn't important anymore. So yes, handheld Switch 2 is 1.72 TFLOPs. For raw-rasterization, that's not enough to say it is better than the Steam Deck 2 though, because 1 Ampere TFLOP ~ .7 - .75 RDNA2 TFLOPs when it comes to inferring rasterization performance. On paper, in a pure rasterized workload a max-TDP Steam Deck would outperform a Switch 2 handheld, all else kept equal. But with DLSS and in mixed ray-tracing/rasterized workloads (which are increasingly more common) the Switch 2 handheld should make up the gap.
Again, why can the Switch 2 pull this off at a lower wattage and frequencies than the Steam Deck? Because the Switch 2 has three times the shading units/cores (1536 for Switch 2 vs. 512 for Steam Deck.)
The Steam Deck starts to collapse in terms of power-efficiency at about 1200Mhz or more, and the voltage has to rapidly increase to increase frequency beyond this, and therefore the power-consumption increase quadratically with voltage. So much so that in order to get that last 400 Mhz the power-consumption has to double on the Steam Deck. You can get 75% of the Steam Deck's performance when running at half its max TDP.
Edit: Also that is without considering that most Steam Deck games run on a compatibility layer with performance loss + x86 (even AMD x86) is less efficient than ARM at sub-15W TDPs unless you use actual x86 efficiency cores (that cut out some of the instruction set), which nobody does because of compatibility issues.
Last edited by sc94597 - on 15 January 2025
