How Will be Switch 2 Performance Wise?

[HoloDust]

sc94597 said:

HoloDust said:

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?).

I am not sure if we could use the RTX 3060 : SW2 RX 6600XT : Steam Deck relationship to understand much, given that RTGI could be a bottleneck at lower compute/render-load for RDNA2 in a way it isn't for Ampere, but not much of a bottleneck when running the game at 1080p Ultra on these beefier twins because other aspects of the game's render pipeline might predominate after getting past that initial "minimum requirement" for the most basic RTGI. 

The fact that the game doesn't scale much in terms of performance with different input resolution hints that the bottleneck for Steam Deck isn't necessarily pure general render-load and cutting out some geometry probably would only marginally improve performance on Steam Deck. Especially when many of these cutbacks seem to be to improve a CPU-bottleneck on SW2 more than a GPU-bottleneck (entire assets are removed, object culling is changed, lower NPC density, etc) and Steam Deck has a significantly more powerful CPU than SW2 that shouldn't be too much of a bottleneck in the first place. I'd suspect a "Steam Deck" optimized version would instead cut into the RT pretty heavily, given that - that is the only modification that seems to drastically improve performance (unless one considers adding FG to "improve performance.") Just porting a SW2-esque version that mostly is cutting to save CPU resources and scaling by resolution to Steam Deck probably won't make it playable in the same way reducing render resolution doesn't already. 

And of course adding new lighting solutions is more difficult than cutting assets, from a development perspective. I do agree though, that it is hard to compare like-to-like here. But that is true of every PC vs. Console comparison and really isn't that important when talking about the end results for a given price -- which are what actually matter. Every platform, including Switch 2 (as HW-accelerated RT wasn't fully taken advantage of, as an example) could benefit from more optimization and more development resources. 

Not sure I follow that bit about scaling with different input resolutions...but as I said, I'd love to see at what clock GPU runs in Deck in Outlaws, if it's at its maximum allowed (like CP2077 does) or not.

Anyway, Ubisoft games tend to really like AMD's GPUs - Outlaws is no different. While this SW2 port might be custom solution that is best suited to run on this specific nVidia low powered SoC, I'm fairly certain that, if Deck was actual handheld console and given the same treatment the way Switch 2's port has been, we would see Outlaws running on it without problems that running off the shelf PC version has.

But yeah, as just PC in the handheld form, actual 1 to 1 comparisons is not really possible, and as always you need beefier PC to match optimized console, and that of course means higher price.