Five reasons why I am not bothered by Nintendo's Switch 2 hardware and software pricing

[Bofferbrauer2]

Conina said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

The hardware price doesn't bother me.

One look at the cheapest Steam Deck with it's cheapest configuration, which costs $399, shows that the Switch 2 is much more powerful and better equipped for just $50 more.

• The Switch 2 comes with a 1080p screen while the Steam Deck only has an 800p screen. It's also larger than the one on the Deck
• The cheapest Steam Deck just comes with 64GB of eMMC memory for storage, while the Switch 2 has 256GB of presumably faster storage.
• the Switch 2 is more powerful and has DLSS as an option; Steam Deck can do FSR but only up to FSR 3.1, which is visually inferior to DLSS 3.x or even 4.0. This is especially helpful when any amount of Raytracing is supposed to happen, as RDNA2 is very weak in that domain.
• It comes with additional hardware for NFC (Amiibo), the detachable Joycons that can also double as a computer mouse, etc...

So yeah, when you compare both then the price of $450 really makes sense.

The $399 Steam Deck comes with 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD for storage. If the internal storage of the Switch 2 is faster or slower ain't tested so far.

P.S.: I just benchmarked the internal SSD and a microSD card (SanDisk Extreme A2) on my Steamdeck.

The SSD reads sequential up to 3300 MB/s, the microSD card only up to 90 MB/s (so the internal memory is ~35x as fast).
Random reads on SSD up to 520 MB/s... ~52x as fast as the microSD card.

All microSD express cards I found are advertised with "up to 900 MB/s"... don't know if Nintendo uses faster internal memory or wants parity between internal memory and microSD Express cards.

bolded: Either that's a recent change, or not in all regions, as the most basic LCD Steam Deck here comes only with just 64GB eMMC storage, like this one.

italic: Yeah, all are just first gen SD Express with PCIe 3.1x1, but the standard also has PCIe 4.0x1 and 4.0x2, so basically doubling and quadrupling the bandwidth over PCIe 3.1x1. Since almost nobody used SD Express prior to the Switch 2, companies were not really investing much into the technology and just released a couple 1st gen cards, but with the Switch now incoming I'm fairly certain more will follow, and that they will also use the faster versions then. It's all the same SD specification even, so I think the Switch can also handle the faster versions.

You just compared it to a normal SD card, and going by it's speed I would say it's an UHS-I card. Of course the combination of a much slower SD card than the SD Express on Switch 2 and a much faster SSD than the eMMC on the most basic Steam Deck will make a giant variation in the performance that isn't representative to either console in this discussion.

Edit: Doublechecked on Steam and it looks like Valve discontinued the 64GB eMMC version by now, and the 256GB SSD version is now the base at 419€ here. But the other points all still stand.

Last edited by Bofferbrauer2 - on 13 April 2025