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Biggerboat1 on 18 June 2025
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sc94597 said:
Biggerboat1 said:

sc94597, after spending time with the hardware and having a good level of insight into what choices Nintendo had available to them when designing the console, what would you rate the S2 out of 10? 

For 2025, I'd give it a 7 out of 10. In the upper-midrange for handhelds in terms of performance and great build quality for its price. 

Nintendo could've probably gone with a Lovelace chipset for not much more money if they intended to release this year from the start. That would've been +30% the performance and put it in Series S territory (although I am unsure how they'd resolve the memory bandwidth bottleneck without a $500 price-tag.) If they did that, that would probably put it at about 9 out of 10, making it roughly comparable to the Z2E/HX370 systems that are releasing currently.

For 2023/2024 (when it probably was originally planned to release) it would also get a 9 out of 10, since it is basically on par with the Z1E Rog Ally.

Add a point to all of this if Nintendo implements a plug-in handheld TDP mode, fixes HDR and fixes VRR on external displays. 

OLED would be unrealistic if VRR is a goal. 

Thanks, that's the same score I gave it on one of these threads, but that was based purely on the spec sheet as I haven't actually seen/played one in the wild.

7/10 is good but it would have been nice if they'd really went for it this time... 

It's the fact that they'll prob make us wait 7 or 8 years for the next one that makes it sting a little more.

Anyway, I'll buy one at some stage when it's back in stock & hopefully the software will be so good that I forget about the tech (just watched the DK trailer & it looks like good fun, even if the visuals don't look mind-blowing - not sure if that's a hardware limitation or the artstyle though...)