By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
Soundwave on 03 September 2025
Edit Thread
sc94597 said:
Soundwave said:

Obviously there are going to be some differences, the fact that the lighting engine is largely intact on the Switch 2 and has any ray tracing whatsoever is fucking bonkers on a portable 10-15 watt console in a big open world 9th gen game to begin with. 

I think honestly this puts to bed whether or not this is impressive hardware or not, this is very obviously already on the high end of what people were saying might be possible for this system, maybe even already beyond what a lot of people said was the roof and the system is only a few weeks old. 

I was actually one of a few who were expecting Switch 2 to have more examples of ray-tracing than Series S, when it became clear it had a T239. Switch 2 is roughly half as powerful as Series S for raster-loads, but unit per unit Ampere GPU's perform +30-50% compared to RDNA2 in RT workloads, and the more intensive the RT load the more that gap widens. Basically was expecting developers to go for a locked 30fps in games the Series S would target 60fps but with better RT effects, etc. But I also thought at the time it would have faster unified memory, more usable ram (only 1.5GB-2GB allocated to OS), and higher CPU clocks/more CPU cores than it does. 

But as far as I am aware, this game isn't using all of the T239's RT features anyway. Like ray reconstruction isn't used for example, and that can drastically improve quality with relatively minimal performance impact. 

It was said for years here, 1536 CUDA cores right off the bat is a fuckton of CUDA cores for a device that's supposedly a borked, low performance "don't get your hopes up cuz Nintendo!" system. 

That should have right there and then been a tip off that this wasn't going to be poor hardware, but some people really really wanted to keep banging their head against a brick wall and not listen. 

Finally, I think we should acknowledge Furukawa's time as Nintendo president will likely lead Nintendo is a new and different era. Maybe not bleeding edge hardware, but certainly not afraid of relatively modern tech either. Which is actually more in line with actually Nintendo's core history in hardware under Yamauchi anyway. The NES, SNES, N64, and GameCube were all relatively good to great hardware for their time of release given that they were all designed to be relatively affordable also. 

The people who really operate under the idea of Nintendo = Iwata's time as president (2003-2015) only are ignorant and don't have the gaming knowledge they think they do. Nintendo was making game consoles for decades prior to that.