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

[Soundwave]

curl-6 said:

Soundwave said:

Watt for watt what the Switch 2 can produce at even just under 10 watts when even PC handhelds need like double, triple that just to stretch their legs is fucking crazy actually. The ROG Ally can't do shit with 10 watts even with a much better node and a larger battery and a far larger body size.

Nintendo and Nvidia should be given a shit ton of credit for this design, at 8nm it somehow uses *less* power than most/all PC portables while also having a smaller battery to draw on, and yet it can deliver equal/better results in a lot of games while those PC handhelds are also on a theoretically better nodes (5nm TSMC generally) and is far thinner than those devices on top of that.

They optimized the shit out this 8nm Tegra, even Digital Foundry raves about what it can produce at such a low power envelope and it's not even close to being on a cutting edge node.

Nintendo and Nvidia should be proud of what they've built here, the visuals it can produce at such a tiny power draw is insane, even doubly so when you know it's not doing that be leaning on a cutting edge 3nm or even 5nm process. This thing is definitely a technical marvel when you actually understand what its built on but too many people are stuck in their biases to admit that. They were happy to bring up the nodes for months on end when it meant the machine would be underpowered but when it turns out that Nintendo/Nvidia cooked and got crazy ass performance out of that design through smart optimization, not a single peep about it being an impressive achievement on this board. Quiet as a church mouse. Fairly obvious why that is. 

Plenty of us said we were impressed with what Switch 2 turned out to be capable of. I know I did, many times.

The downplayers have almost entirely fallen silent, there's no need to keep dredging up a debate from like 6 months ago.

They've shifted now to "well it's no big deal actually, of course Switch 2 was going to run those games, I always knew that" (lol no you weren't saying that 3, 2, or even 1 year ago here) but hey sure whatever at this point. 

All I'm saying is I suspect provided this board is still even functioning at the time that future Nintendo hardware discussion (Switch or Switch 2 Pro) will be a lot more nuanced and with far less bullshit because a whole lot of people ate a lot of crow with their behavior in Switch 2 threads and probably learned a lesson that it ain't 2006 or even 2012 anymore, times have changed and in terms of Nintendo different management means different hardware priorities. 

Or in this case more like a return to Nitnendo's original hardware philosophy which was good hardware performance at a reasonable cost. I always hated the bullshit revisionist history that the NES/Famicom was some kind of low end machine. The Famicom launched the same day in Japan as the Sega SG-1000 and it  destroyed the SG-1000 in hardware performance, like almost a full generation beyond, and for the time it had arcade quality graphics (the Famicom chip was literally used by Nintendo in tons of popular arcade cabinets of its day). The NES/Famicom was never like "the Wii" of its time, it blew the shit out of what most people in US were accustomed to hardware wise in the 80s prior to that which was the Atari 2600. 

Last edited by Soundwave - on 12 January 2026