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SvennoJ on 22 June 2025
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Biggerboat1 said:

DF hardware review up.

Main takeaways as far as I remember (watched it yesterday)

Good:

Overall good level of performance, setting Nintendo up well for the generation.

Amazing efficiency at 8nm/10nm, they were kinda blown away.
From the pretty poultry battery they were still clocking about 2.5 hours for the most demanding games.
They showed Cyberpunk drawing 10% of the power to run Cyberpunk compared to the PS5 slim, albeit at reduced frame rate & resolution (maybe someone with better maths skills than I can figure out the comparative wattage per pixel/second for both systems)
They're gonna release efficiency comparisons with Steam Deck & have hinted that it's expected to be a big win for S2.
A certain poster has a serious serving of humble pie coming his way.

Backwards compatibility very good & above expectations.

Switch 2 Pro controller amazing.

The chat feature better than expected & pretty miraculous in terms of noise cancellation/audio processing, minimal impact on game performance.

Ethernet and wifi downloads a big step up from S1, though Wifi still not great and significantly slower than Steam Deck.

Bad:

The screen got hammered.
It's essentially not HDR & it's more laggy than the OG Switch 1 panel (moving objects smear) to the point of being significantly distracting.
VRR is seemingly not working for frame-rates under 40fps, where it's needed most, though they think this is an implementation issue from devs as the screen should be technically capable.
It's colours lean quite cold.

The TV screen calibration tool is poorly implemented & unintelligible to the average gamer.

Games can load quite a bit slower from cartridges vs internal storage/SD Express

Joycons still have a bit of give when connected to the console.

Streaming games to S1 is quite poor.
It's reasonably responsive but the video stream is very low res with bad image quality & offers a far worse experience than playing native. This was only tested on Fast Fusion, which due to it's high speed nature shows these problems at their worst.

It's a long video but I think those are the main points, though feel free to add anything I've missed or misinterpreted.

Overall I think it's how I expected the review to go down, with the exception of the screen. It seems like Nintendo really dropped the ball there, they just seem prone to frustrating penny-pinching in certain areas... (give us a more semi-modern node, a decent sized battery and a good screen FFS).

Is there a chance the smearing can be fixed via an update or is it likely 100% baked into the hardware?

You can fix 'smearing' by lowering the pulse width, but that also reduces the brightness. Maybe lowering brightness already works that way. It does for PSVR2, the brightness setting lowers pulse width, thus longer black in between frames, less smearing. 

Text version with screenshots
https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2025-nintendo-switch-2-the-digital-foundry-hardware-review



Wattage per pixel per second would be 46,656,000 avg pixels per second on Switch 2, 2,221,714 pixels per watt
For PS5 Slim 159,805,440 avg pixels per second (3.42x as many), 714,693 pixels per watt (Switch 3.11x more efficient)

Crude math, just taking the average of the reported resolution 810p for Switch 2, 1224p for PS5 (ignoring the FSR 2.1 upscale to 1800p)

On a side note, the fan inside PS5 already uses more power than the Switch 2 ;) 25.8 watts.