| Chrkeller said: How true is that though? Not questioning you, just always wanted to talk about this. Games require system ram and not just for OS. The deck has like 16 gb ram, 4 for OS, 4 is vram other 8 is system. A S2 has 12 gb and 3 is for the OS... but that remaining 9 gb isn't vram. Half or more will be used as system ram. So really the S2 has 4 dedicated vram, which is what the 2050 has. Or am I thinking of this wrong? Point I'm getting is people to think the S2 has ram being used by OS and vram... this isn't true. The S2 doesn't have 9 gb dedicated to vram. At most it would be 6 gb, at most. Yeah? |
The Switch 2's unified memory is as fast as (actually slightly faster than some of) the 2050's VRAM (at least in docked mode, moderately slower in handheld mode.) So for all intents and purposes it is VRAM. Just VRAM that the CPU also might use, if it needs to. You don't need to consider "system ram" in the case of the Switch 2 because both the GPU and CPU have full access to the 9 GB of resources that aren't dedicated to the OS, and can dynamically utilize it. There really isn't a step where you need to move or copy data from system memory (aka PCI-E copy) to the VRAM for consoles in the same way as PC. In the case of these RTX 2050 laptops, if the 4GB of dedicated VRAM is exhausted then there has to be a data pipeline from the even slower (in RTX 2050's case usually half to 2/3rds as slow) system memory. This increases latency in most cases, and these 9th Generation Games are bandwidth hungry/latency sensitive if anything else. Modern API's like Direct X12 and Vulkan try to mitigate these issues, but none have fully resolved it and developers don't always implement these mitigations.
Now this isn't to say the Switch 2 can solve all memory capacity issues. Obviously having 16GB of System Ram + 4GB of VRAM might be advantageous compared to Switch 2's 12GB of unified memory (with 3GB allocated for the OS), but in modern 9th Generation titles VRAM capacity can be an independent bottleneck from overall memory capacity and it really has been showing to be this generation. If you have a VRAM bottleneck it doesn't matter if you bought 128GB of system ram, you'll still have a VRAM bottleneck.
Last edited by sc94597 - on 22 August 2025
