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

[Chrkeller]

Soundwave said:

Chrkeller said:

In terms of support, it won't impact the S2.  I meant right now the S2 is above or at the level of PC handhelds.  But the next round of handhelds will support FSR4 and have better chips, meaning it will be the weakest handheld at some point this year or next.  

And when the ps6 gets good upscaling, it can reduce rendered resolution and use power for other things.  I fully expect the ps6 to be built with upscaling in mind.  

In terms of fidelity, not releases, the biggest advantage of the S2 is upscaling.  This advantage will go away at some point via FSR4, which is quite good.

In terms of releases, I am not worried.  Silent Hill F runs on a 1070ti (2017 and 4 generations behind current) all the way up to a 5090.  Games are scalable.  Releases don't classify hardware generations anymore.  We dont live in the 90s anymore.

Edit

Nvidia deserves a ton of credit for the technology and Nintendo deserves credit for recognizing the importance.  Even with my 4090 I render at 1440p and upscale to 4k, versus native 4k.  The difference is massive.  I get 50% more fps.  Easily will take a game from 60 fps to 90 fps, sometimes more.

I doubt even in a year you'll be able to get much for $450 that is better hardware than the Switch 2. At $600-$800? OK, but that's not any different from any other console hardware. It was easy to get better hardware than the PS5 from day 1, a year++ after launch, no problem.

That's always been the case with consoles. The Atari Jaguar and 3DO was better hardware than the Super NES, good for the 10 people who owned one. 

Nintendo didn't accidentally get this performance, they designed a piece of hardware that would let them run next gen games and still be able to be sold at a reasonable cost. That's a notable difference from the Iwata-era, as the Wii and DS product lines were essentially aimed at casual gamers first. 

Frankly every other Nintendo console (as in the home console lineage) past the Wii brand be it NES, SNES, N64, GameCube, Switch 1, and now Switch 2 has all been pretty decent hardware for its time. Wii was just a product line aimed for casuals that had about a 6 year run before it fizzled out then Wii U just flopped outright. Wii-Wii U is old news today, Nintendo has returned to making reasonably powerful consoles that can run the modern 3rd party games of its time for the mass market (millions of gamers) to enjoy. 

I know.  It is called sacrificing power for price, because it is a mass appeal product and not premium. 😉

Console hardware, including S2, will always be more bang for the buck compared to PC.  Volume discounts on hardware, taking hits and making it up via subscriptions, etc.