Was Nintendo right to opt out of the graphics arms race?

[curl-6]

Soundwave said:

curl-6 said:

Switch 1 was capable of running PS4/XBO titles. The gap in technical quality was bigger then that it is now with Switch 2, but stuff like Witcher 3, Doom 2016/Eternal, Hellblade, Sniper Elite 4, Ace Combat 7, etc ran on Switch just fine.

There was indeed a lot of downplaying of Switch 2's capabilities prior to release and early in its life, but I think you need to let that go and move on at this point. Time proved them wrong, there's no need to hold a grudge.

It was 3 years of non-stop of the same thing in every Switch 2 thread to be fair. And I held back in saying too much, like for example you could see people were licking their chops to declare the Switch 2 a hardware disaster as early Star Wars Outlaws videos looked iffy on performance, but then the final build came out and you could see the air went out the room for a lot of folks on that bandwagon. Not only was it a competent port, it was an extremely impressive port and this is a game only a few months into the system's product cycle.

I refrained from crowing too loudly then, but you bet your ass if that port was bad the folks on the other side of the fence would've made a massive stink about that with non-stop posting. 

The Witcher 3 is the example everyone uses on the Switch 1 but that was a fairly rough port and required a full dev team to sit down an entire year to make. We're already getting quite impressive ports on the Switch 2 right from basically the beginning of its product cycle. 

I was the most optimistic person on the Switch 2's capabilities probably on this board and it not only has largely fulfilled everything I predicted the final product is honestly better than what I would have predicted. I would have thought ray tracing for example would maybe happen in like games like Animal Crossing and Switch 1 ports, things like that. But to have it in a modern gen open world game with the graphical fidelity of a Star Wars Outlaws? That runs reasonably well? I mean that's beyond my expectations for sure. 

As I said, the gap is smaller this time around. Console ports were possible though on Switch 1, and some even turned out remarkably solid.

And yes, there were a ton of haters salivating over the thought of Switch 2 ports turning out bad, who were then slapped in the face by how Outlaws turned out. But that was months ago and they've since retreated with their tails between theirs legs, there's no reason to keep fighting a battle that's been over for some time now.