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

[Soundwave]

Pemalite said:

Soundwave said:

lol the full Orin chip was a design for automobiles running off a *car battery*, if the Switch 2 used it would be comically oversized and cost far more, no shit they didn't use the full size chip. That chip was never designed for a game console, certainly not a portable one. 

Literally -all- the Orin chips were designed for automobiles via nVidia's DRIVE initiative.

nVidia then repurposed Orin for Jetson for industrial applications, automation, signage, robotics, IoT, edge devices and developers.

Almost like one piece of silicon can be used for multiple markets, who would have thunk?

A fully unlocked Tegra Orin can run in a handheld, Nintendo just chose not to in order to achieve a certain price/performance/power balance.
Nintendo's decision isn't an incorrect one.

But you would be a fool if you didn't acknowledge other and options were also available.

Soundwave said:

You can Google the Nvidia hardware leaks, there were Ada Lovelace features like media block and compression tech that show up in the data leaks for T239, it was discussed here years ago. Looking at the T239 chip under XRay and seeing that it's quite different from the Tegra T234 who knows how much else they took from the Lovelace designs because that definitely is not just a stripped/dumped T234. People using the Nvidia T234 Orin power calculator while well intentioned also turned out to be wrong I think ... Switch 2's chip has considerably better power efficiency, how exactly they pulled that off I would like to hear more from Nvidia and Nintendo on. I suspect they copied further features from Ada Lovelace to enable that, because at 8nm with that tiny ass battery they should not be getting these results. Not based on Orin power calculations anyhow. 

I don't subscribe to leaks and rumors, I subscribe to facts.

Plus... The burden of proof doesn't lay with me.
Try again or we can label your assertion as unsubstantiated and potentially false. Up to you.

Soundwave said:

On the scale of Nintendo hardware, Switch 2 is definitely on the "premium" end of that, meaning it is not budget hardware like the Wii, Wii U, 3DS, DS, Game Boy were. It's more in line with what the N64 or GameCube were for their time. I mean do you want to set up some official terminology just for this board on that because I'd be fine with that. Premium PC GPUs are generally what I consider the pricier ones, and yeah no one really does care that much about that because it's not a big part of the market. Again if you want to establish some kind of official board nomenclature for that for everyone to abide by, fine. 

If your comparison on whether the Switch 2 is Premium or not is a comparison directly with other Nintendo devices... Then you need to realize that Nintendo doesn't exist in a vacuum, it has competitors.

The Switch 2 is NOT a premium device.

And considering you literally just said "No one cares if a device is premium" kinda' makes your argument entirely pointless anyway.
Stop backflipping.

Premium GPU's are not just "pricier ones" you can get "Premium" GPU's at every price point, they are for professional users. I.E. Quadro, Instinct, Radeon Pro, RTX Pro and more.

A low-end Quadro might be cheaper and perform slower than a Geforce RTX 5090, but it's still a premium part, it's the price relative to performance that is the key driver, you are paying more for better support, better drivers and certain features that appeal to professional users.

THAT is a premium part. Just a higher priced, mid-range performing piece of hardware like the Switch 2? That's not Premium.

Soundwave said:

Clearly there are huge differences between Nintendo of 2026 and Nintendo of 2006 just like there are huge differences between Nintendo of 1996 and 2006.

No one has argued otherwise.

Soundwave said:

You know people who grew up with the NES/SNES/N64/GameCube could say the same shit about the Wii/Wii U/DS/3DS being not the "real" Nintendo either. People need to stop using what they Nintendo has done in the past 10 years as some kind of holy religious decree that can't change, like yeah they might do the same thing again, but they might do the complete opposite too (and they have done that in their past also). You have to understand who is the head of the company and the hardware division too, that's not some small detail to gloss over. 

I have owned every single Nintendo console since the 1980's with the exception of the Gamecube and Wii. 
I don't care about the political "what is the real Nintendo" bullshit, I enjoy and judge the platform by the games they deliver... And yes, I will criticize key aspects from every console manufacturer if they deserve it... And right now, Nintendo deserves it with that stupid display.

Soundwave said:

The Switch 2 is quite powerful and was expressly designed as such, in an interview with lead designers of the Switch 2 they mentioned that while the Switch 1 had an OK chip for its time, they weren't satisfied with its graphics capability of the Switch 1 and wanted better. And the Switch 1 wasn't like some terrible chip it could even run some PS4 tier games, most notably DOOM, Witcher 3, etc. The fact that the Tegra X1 didn't satisfy the new heads of Nintendo's hardware department tells you right there this ain't the old guard of Nintendo to begin with. 

The Switch 1 SoC was able to do everything the Xbox One/Playstation 4 could do natively in hardware, there wasn't any need to rework any of the rendering pipeline.

The Switch 1 SoC was literally a fully unlocked Tegra X1.. If Nintendo wanted more, they could have had 50% more performance by opting for Tegra X2, which is pin-compatible and ISA compatible with the Tegra X1 being Pascal based. (And having better Delta Colour Compression for more memory bandwidth)
The Tegra X2 could run at higher clocks at the same TDP compared to Tegra X1.

The Tegra X1 chip in the Switch was a competent albeit mid-range chip for 2017. It just sacrificed clockrates to maintain TDP.

And the Switch 2?
It's not even a fully unlocked Tegra Orin chip, it's also reduced in clocks... And compared to other chips on the market is definitely mid-range in the ARM SoC space.
Ironically Nintendo also had the option with Switch 2 to have 50% more performance on release at the same TDP by opting for Tegra Thor.

The 8nm Samsung chip isn't doing nVidia any favors in the ARM SoC space I am afraid, nVidia gave up on the market.

And literally every console could have used a better chip. The PS5 could have had a better chip. The Gamecube could have had a better chip. The PS2 could have had a better chip. The XBox Series S/X, there were better chips available, why is it for this one console we need to act like Nintendo has committed some kind of mortal sin? The chip they chose performs very well and I have no problem giving them props for that.

The Orin chip is not suitable to be 1:1 put into a portable game console it had a lot of shit in it that's useless for a game console and is a massive chip for a portable. It has a 455 mm die size, that's larger than a freaking launch PS5, there's no way it would get even an hour of battery life unless Nintendo completely changed the design and made a bulkier, more expensive, heavier system for little gain. 

The Nvidia leak has been proven to be correct, unless you think they just randomly guessed the CUDA core number and other facts from out of thin air (in which case maybe they should buy a lottery ticket), so yes the onus then lies on you to disprove that and show where it is incorrect if you have a problem with those conclusions. 

This is Switch 2 versus a $1000 portable (is that premium, or what do you want to call that? $1000 is budget friendly?). I would say this level of performance is significantly better than just "OK", this is holding its own fairly well against an extremely expensive gaming device. This comparison is also I believe without the early release performance patch for the Switch 2 and likely there will be other patches coming which will improve the performance of the Switch 2 version

Nintendo could easily have charged $600 for this hardware if they really wanted to, sure the ROG Ally X is better in some respects, but this is also a lot closer than it has any business being, the ROG Ally X is over 2x the cost of a Switch 2. It's just hilarious how many pretzels some people want to twist into to avoid acknowledging that this is probably a very different era of Nintendo hardware. This result is much more in line with systems like the GameCube and N64 which did have impressive hardware performance for their day. And this isn't likely even the best the Switch 2 can ever do, there likely will be better ports as the system is still early and Nintendo sent out dev kits late, there will be better examples of the Switch 2's hardware than this as time goes on. That is undocked only for the Switch 2 also obviously, docked mode may have better results in some areas.

To get this result too while the Switch 2 only runs at about 9-10 watts undocked from 8nm whereas the ROG Ally X there is using 20+ watts is also fairly impressive. The new hardware team at Nintendo and Nvidia did some impressive work in getting this level of performance from that low of a power draw (am I allowed to say that? Or is that not allowed here?). Watt for watt I don't think there's anything on the market that gets this performance at 10 watts. 

Last edited by Soundwave - on 14 January 2026