Currently Online 
| bonzobanana said: Excuse my ignorance but there is a lot of debate here about performance of Switch 2 but I've yet to see any confirmed specs for the Switch 2. Normally there is quite a high downclock between development hardware and retail |
You're never going to get "official specs" from Nintendo or Nvidia.
The best we'll get is over the years through analysis of the hardware and software exploitations, that reveal the performance data, more information on the precise specs.
It is not "normal" for a released platform to be drastically weaker than development hardware. Sometimes a platform might have less ram or fewer unlocked cores in a CPU as the dev kits need those extra resources for performance testing software and other middleware, but that is typically the extent of it. The leaked specs suggest that developers have 16GB of ram available (rather than the 12GB for retail) and we know very little about the CPU other than it is an ARM chip with probably A78C cores (although some rumors/a recent leak have suggested a hierarchy of 1 X1, 3 A78C, and 4 A55) and maybe its clocked rates as suggested by the API.
The original Switch was much lower clocked than the Nvidia shield, but that was because its chipset wasn't customly designed for it and Nintendo purchased it as a sort of "hand me down."
If we take the leaked specs at face value (which are already retail specs, not dev specs), Switch 2 handheld mode is within +/- 10% of the performance at brute-force tasks as Steam Deck 12W mode. It probably is a lot more efficient at lower-end TDP's, although you can get about 80% of the Steam Deck's performance at 6W, so not that much more efficient. The reason why directly comparing nodes doesn't make sense is that the CPU's and GPU's are using very different architectures.
Then there is the issue that most Steam Deck games are running on a compatibility layer with performance losses due to that, only in the single digit percentages, but significant nevertheless.
Most Steam Deck games don't run at native resolution either. People are using FSR Balanced/Performance and Lossless Scaling to get games playeable at 800p and 720p output. So internally Steam Deck is also running games at 300-540p and upscaling. Albeit with a worse upscaler.
