In just two days it will have been two months since the announcement. Time is moving way too fast.

I would hope for a 4+2 Big.Little CPU configuration with the 2 little cores for the OS/Background tasks. The Switch's UI can be fairly clunky due to a lack of resources available to it... 1 core at 1ghz just isn't enough. Double it and then we are talking...
8 powerful cores would just be a waste of power for a handheld that could be used to drive the GPU.

10GB would require an oddball memory controller or the memory interleaved which can impact performance... Go 16GB or 8GB rather than anything in between and maximize that bandwidth.

Gflop doesn't determine the performance of the GPU... But I would personally hope for a minimum of 1024 Cuda cores at 1Ghz with Ray Tracing and Tensor cores.
I would also like to see the ROP and TMU count doubled over Tegra X1 (Although unlikely), it's easy to leave them static and drive up the capability through increased clocks... But it just wouldn't be balanced.

Storage... Whilst NVMe is the ducks nuts, eMMC is more cost-effective and energy efficient... As long as they can keep latencies down, eMMC will be fine if it's backed by a decent memory system... Need to maximize that battery life. A full blown SSD would mean a reduction in CPU/GPU/Ram to fit the handhelds TDP.

I think the general consensus is that Nintendo's handhelds will always be a generation behind visually compared to fixed home consoles if they rely on nVidia's mobile technology, so Xbox One/Playstation 4 levels of visuals would be the expectation.

I would love to see Xenoblade on Playstation or Xbox using those platforms resources, the games would look absolutely stunning... But would they be more enjoyable? For me, yes, but others probably don't care much as long as the artistic flair is still present and the games are fun.

These images just look like upscaled Switch games though. Far to clean, but with texture maps that are clearly WiiU/Switch level.

If they map the memory so that 2GB of the "slower" portion of the RAM is for the OS only, then that would be fine.
But... This is also Nintendo.. They don't have the software engineering that Microsoft has to elegantly pull something like that off.

16GB is unlikely to be much more costly than 10GB to be honest, not with density of chips increasing.
The Series S is a console of compromises.

Keep in mind that eMMC and SSD's are actually based on the same technology... Which is NAND.
If you have enough DRAM, you don't actually need an SSD... It just means the compromise will be a longer initial load time unless you use procedural generation.

Keep in mind the Steamdeck is in the PC ecosystem, which typically tends to be more memory rich.
Case in point... My PC has 64GB of system memory, but also 16GB of Graphics memory for a total of 78GB of Ram... Kinda' makes the 16GB in the Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 seem anemic by comparison...

What are you describing is culling.

Culling itself has been a technique developers have used for several decades now, it's actually not new... For example, 22! years ago AMD implemented Hypzer-Z into it's GPU's which is actually several techniques...

Technique 1: Hierarchical Z.
Technique 2: Z-Compression.
Technique 3: Fast Z-Clear.

Hierarchical Z is basically where the rendered pixel is checked off against the Z-Buffer before it gets rendered.. And if it gets a negative result (I.E. Outside of a players view) it gets discarded saving on resources.

I won't elaborate on the other features as they aren't a form of culling exactly, but they all do play a role with each other.

AMD introduced the Primitive Shader a few years ago with it's Vega architecture, nVidia much earlier than that (Likely Maxwell, so the current Switch has a similar technique), where a new shader stage was implemented instead of the Vertex and geometry shader paths, which allows for the discarding of primitives.. Which reduces the overdraw of polygons rather significantly.

We can also take something like Call of Duty: Modern Warefare 2 from the Xbox 360 which implemented mesh and texture streaming from the optical disk to stream those assets on-demand into system memory... And as we know, Optical disks are orders of magnitude slower than a mechanical disk with much higher latencies.

Again, SSD's weren't required for any of this.

So what we can surmise from this is that... Loading things "on demand" is not an SSD requirement.
Culling is also not an SSD requirement.

What an SSD does do however... Is expedite the process. It's about how much memory you can shift into system memory *over time*.

If you have enough DRAM, you can sidestep all of this entirely, you just need a lengthier initial load.

Another famous example is actually Metroid on the Gamecube, it starts loading new sections of a level as you approach a door... And unloads them as you step further away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwhS76r0OqE

Again, no SSD required.

The biggest benefit an SSD has over traditional media is actually access times. You don't need to wait upwards of 15ms, data is available in as little as 0.1ms.
And that becomes increasingly important once you start doing allot of random reads/writes where a mechanical or optical disk can jump upwards to 100ms or more.

Just remember that eMMC memory is NAND, just like an SSD, it's how they are "controlled" which is the ultimate differentiator.

Besides, the market seems to be going towards UFS as we see in the mobile sector... As eMMC has stagnated since 2019. UFS allows for 2.9GB/s and higher anyway and is the eMMC successor.

But an SSD isn't going to be a requirement to receive Playstation 5/Xbox Series X/PC ports, lots of PC's still run games from spinning rust drives.

Accidental double post.

Yeah the actual screens are almost certainly upsampled as is pretty standard for games on all platforms, but the actual assets and the trailer footage, to me looks like nothing the Switch couldn't handle.

It's a significant step up from Xenoblade 2, but that should be expected comparing a game from a system's 1st year to a game in it's 6th year. Monolith are perhaps the most technically ambitious of Nintendo's first party studios and even Torna showed improvement over its base game graphically, and that was 4 years ago.

I have seen nothing, from a birds eye view at least, that looks superior to XC 2. I'm not doubting it is better, since it is newer and they know the system more, but certainly it isn't so much better for all these comments about how much better it looks. I feel like, when I hear people talk about massive visual upgrades, and I can't tell any difference, that I am blind or something lol.

What caught my eye from the trailer was better long distance views, (stuff far off tended to look muddy in XB2) better particle effects, and better character models.

NA put a key artwork in the game's page.