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bonzobanana on 21 October 2025
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Pemalite said:

Pretty much what I expect.

Slower hardware in terms of paper specs, but definitely smarter and more efficient hardware that let's it hang with it's contemporaries and in some cases, even beat them. (Series S.)

It will be interesting to see how the Switch 2 holds up when/if Microsoft drops a new next-gen console sometime in the next 12 months... And how AMD handles the transition of RDNA2/3 integrated graphics for handhelds over to RDNA4... Massive IPC gains to be had, especially once you start using FSR4.

I think what Nintendo needs to work on is a bifurication of form factors to hit other price-segments and... A usable display in a premium console. (OLED!)
And of course... A die-shrink to improve the poor battery life... That Samsung 10nm "rebranded" as an 8nm process is not doing it any favors on that front... Which makes the Switch 2 even more impressive that it can do what it does without having a max of 30mins of battery life.

Maybe Samsungs 7/6/5nm process would be the ideal target, they use similar libraries so should be a good fit? TSMC is likely to expensive for Nintendo these days.

Regardless, Nintendo has lots of directions and improvements to potentially take the Switch 2 handheld over the next few years, but I think I speak for most that a decent OLED panel is definitely on top of the pack.


I don't think TSMC is necessarily that expensive for their older processes. My android tablet a Doogee T30 Pro was £60 from Amazon Warehouse/Resale and yes it was a return but it was £60, perhaps half the price it was selling for at the time brand new and has a Mediatek Helio G99 chipset that was fabricated by TSMC on a 6Nm process. The model was released in 2023 and also has a great IPS 1600 x 2560 screen, 20MP camera, 8GB of memory, 256GB of storage. It is probably around the same CPU performance as Switch 2 but of course graphically I think its more like 280 Gflops from memory so more like original Switch than Switch 2. I feel like 5Nm should be doable if its 18 months away. It can actually emulate some Switch 1 games at full speed. There are various videos on youtube showing this. Any decent emulators written for ARM work very well on it. I think the next Xbox will be a PC designed to be also compatible with older Xbox console titles. It will likely be a console that can only use Microsoft's own PC store and Xbox store. It will be Microsoft's first step away from consoles, blurring the lines somewhat. It won't be great value but it will be great performance. This is what most analysts seem to be expecting.

Like you I've been impressed with Switch 2 battery life all things considered but it is a fixed platform with low CPU resources and games like Cyperpunk in performance mode are only generating a 640x360p image which is AI upscaled to 720p. This isn't something the PS4 or Xbox One series could do they had to natively render at far higher resolutions. So its 19.74Wh battery is doing well to power the console for a minimum of 2 hours so realistically the T239 can only be getting maybe 6-7W tops for the most demanding games allowing for the screen power and other chips. 10Nm plus 19.74Wh equalling 2 hours is very impressive but clearly we don't know the real clocks of the chips. I suspect the Switch 2 GPU is under 1 Teraflop in portable mode. Geekerwan analysed the Switch 2 and said 1.3 Teraflops but that is a peak figure only. Switch 1 could go above 200 Gflops in portable mode but was somewhere between 30-140 Gflops for portable gaming with likely short lived peaks above that in reality. This is probably true of most handhelds and laptops too to be honest. They don't maintain their maximum performance on battery. The benefits of a fixed platform are you can optimise games for reduced battery consumption. Something like the Steamdeck has 4.5x the CPU performance of Switch 2. That CPU performance has a battery runtime cost. Trimming game engines to work with lower CPU resources also maximises battery runtime. It does feel to me Nvidia did focus on power consumption more than AMD because for many years they were on an inferior fabrication process of Samsung 8Nm (10Nm) so maybe they needed to be for their laptop chipsets. Admittedly I have a Nivida RTX 2050 laptop and I don't even bother with the Nvidia when using it off battery I just keep to the AMD GPU but then the AMD APU is on a 7Nm fabrication process and the RTX 2050 is on 10Nm like the Switch 2. I can get about 1 hour just over with the Nvidia chipset at full power but 2-3 hours on the AMD GPU which admittedly is about a third of the power of the Nvidia GPU. 1.5 Teraflops vs 5-10 Teraflops (fp32/fp16).

I suspect the next Switch 2 console with OLED screen will be a huge upgrade and they will have the power resources to overdrive the display panel properly. It will make no difference at all to those that only play docked but as a portable system it will be on another level of quality. However I noticed in Japan some of the criticism for the Switch 2 is its just too big and wonder if Nintendo will take this onboard somehow.