How Will be Switch 2 Performance Wise?

[HoloDust]

sc94597 said:

HoloDust said:

Which is to be expected - the best feature of consoles (and old home computers), at least form my POV, was fixed hardware, so games can be fine tuned for that specific platform.

Take Outlaws - it's running with a lot of cut down geometry on Switch 2 and there's no such preset for PCs. Unfortunately, as much as PC handhelds are nice, I don't think any developer will go extra mile (at least for foreseeable future) to make fine tuned ports just for them, instead of just treating them as low power PCs. Maybe that will change with XBOX ROG Ally, but I kinda doubt it.

bonzobanana said:

I think you will always get fixed platform optimisations for consoles like Switch 2 where they approach a problem by scaling down the game engine to work well on weaker hardware. There are so many variations of PC hardware that will never happen. You do get many low spec gamer or potato gamer patches for pc games. I remember playing Fallout 4 on my Celeron laptop with only 4GB. I used the low texture patches, a low display resolution and potato options and got it running more for a laugh than anything and managed to get about 22 fps at best with 12 fps being the average. I remember playing many ports on Xbox 360 and PS3 but the full experience of those games was on PC. Maybe I've got the wrong impression but it does seem the Steamdeck is delivering a game experience as good if not better than Switch 2 for multi-platform games. Maybe I have watched too many youtube videos with a pro steamdeck bias. 

Addressing you both since the responses were similar. While it is true that Switch 2 has the benefit of closed platform optimizations, I am not convinced we can chalk it entirely up to this. The game runs very poor on Steam Deck even after you apply "low spec gamer" optimizations and essentially only runs well when you turn off RTGI. We have also seen Steam Deck specific optimizations in games like Elden Ring, so it isn't entirely unlikely that a developer could target Steam Deck.

I think much of the performance difference is because Ampere is just a better architecture when it comes to ray-tracing flop-to-flop than RDNA2. With similar raw performance levels between SW2 Handheld and Steam Deck, you're going to see SW2 outperform it in RT-centric titles. Furthermore, the RTGI implementation in Outlaws doesn't even fully utilize hardware acceleration as much as it could, and I would expect the difference to increase as the generation progresses. 

If the difference is due largely to a lower render  load on SW2, we'd expect resolution changes to scale better than it does in reality on Steam Deck. 

That's the thing with custom ports for custom hardware - if you do some napkin math, RTX 3060 is to Switch 2 (both Ampere) what something like RX 6600XT is to Steam Deck (both RDNA2) - but that is only if you let GPU inside Steam Deck run at its boosted clock (1600MHz) - like CP2077 does. And if you look up Outlaws benchmarks for those two GPUs, 3060 is just slightly above 6600XT.

I don't know at what GPU frequency that guy is running Steam Deck at when testing Outlaws, not that it matters much. Outlaws on Switch 2 (just like in case of CP2077) has lot of custom tweaks and cutbacks that help it run the way it runs, and those tweaks are not available on PC, even with lowest settings, so direct comparison is not really possible.

I find Outlaws to be best showcase of what Switch 2 can do, so far. But I'm not convinced that custom port of Outlaws would not perform fairly well on Deck (though not look as good, due to lack of DLSS/FSR4), given how both architectures behave in it when compared in their beefier iterations, instead of that stuttery mess you have in that video (is that even running of NVMe?).

Last edited by HoloDust - on 27 September 2025