Just because it's 9th gen only doesn't mean we can't bring it up with regards to performance issues. Does BDL4 get a free pass to be absolved of all criticism just because it's 9th gen? I'm just saying that now it's Elden ring, in October this topic will resurface with BDL4 release. That's what I suspect anyway

No, but you put it in the sentence after mentioning Elden Ring. If a PS4 game isn't reaching 30, is it surprising that a Gen 9 game isn't?
Almost as if suggesting that Borderlands 4 is in the same generation/category.

"It's slower than a Volvo. Even a Ferrari is faster."

Kinda like that.

I would hope you could hit 4k, 120fps with a 4090... That's the point of a 4090/5090 tier GPU.

Bandwidth is a difficult thing to quantify this day and age, especially as GPU's get smarter and more efficient with tiled based rendering, compression, procedural generation, large caches, streaming, neural rendering and more.

AMD has managed to match/beat nVidia in many areas with the RX 9000 series vs RTX 5000 series at certain tiers, despite having a significant bandwidth deficit, thanks to sticking with cheaper GDDR6 over more expensive GDDR7.

Bandwidth is only a bottleneck if you make it a bottleneck.

The Switch 2 has fixed and quantifiable hardware that developers can work around... You would sooner be GPU compute bound before you are bandwidth limited if your game is running lots of shaders.

A GPU is a sum of it's parts, not one factor... Which I think is the aspect you are ultimately missing here.

Will the Switch 2's GPU be bandwidth limited in some scenarios? Absolutely. But a games rendering load is extremely dynamic, bandwidth isn't always going to be the limiting factor.

Many rendering loads tend to be "bursty" in nature when it comes to bandwidth demands, I.E. You need lots of bandwidth to fill up the GPU's caches, but then the bandwidth demands drop off, you aren't going to require your chips full bandwidth 24/7, especially once those work sets are loaded into the chips cache.

Everything impacts bandwidth.

However... If you break up your scene into tiles, you need less bandwidth, which is why Maxwell was able to beat GCN.
It's called doing more with less.

Keep in mind the Switch 2 has a faster CPU, faster and more modern GPU which is capable of significantly more advanced effects, you cannot chalk up the image quality gain of hogwarts to just bandwidth.

Many games run at similar framerates as the Xbox Series S... But FPS can often be impacted by the CPU being insufficient, rather than bandwidth.

That's what caches are for.

Remember the Radeon 9060XT has 320GB/s of bandwidth and sits just below the 5060 Ti which has 448GB/s of bandwidth, that's a deficit of 128GB/s.
Which tells us that architectural efficiency is often more important than just unadulterated pure bandwidth.

We could take my old RX 580... I upgraded to the RX 6600XT, same 256GB/s bandwidth, I doubled my performance even at 1440P... I then upgraded to the Radeon RX 9060XT which has 320GB/s of bandwidth, which is an extra 64GB/s... And doubled performance again... That's a four fold increase in performance for only a 64GB/s (Quarter!) increase in bandwidth.

Or let's go back to the Radeon 5870 vs the Radeon 7850.
The 5870 has 153GB/s of bandwidth, the Radeon 7850 also has 153GB/s of bandwidth.

The 7850 can beat the 5870 by over 50% with the same memory bandwidth, regardless of resolution.

Efficiency is often the deciding factor over pure black and white bandwidth numbers.

I beat DK last night. Just under 30 hours. A few boss fights were almost exclusively stuck at 30 fps. There was an entire level that mostly ran 30 fps as well.

The instant drop to 30 fps is awful. I wish Nintendo would stop programming their games to go from.60 directly to 30.

The climax of both Void Kong fights dropped to 30 for me, but what "entire level" are you referring to, cos I don't recall that happening in my playthrough.

What you're describing is double buffer v-sync, which is where if the game can't hit its frame time, it waits for the next screen refresh, which means 60 falls to 30. 

As I understand it, there are a couple of solutions to this; you can submit your frame mid-refresh, resulting in screen tearing; Nintendo seems to really dislike this as none of their games have it.

You can also hold a frame in reserve at all times and permanently run one frame behind; this eliminates both screen tearing and hard drops to 30, but it introduces input lag; Nintendo tends to place a premium on responsive gameplay, so input delay was probably a no-no for them.

VRR of course can fix the issue entirely, but for whatever reason its implementation on Switch 2 currently doesn't work. This is unfortunate, but also not unheard of; VRR on PS5 was busted for more than 4 years before finally being fixed a couple months ago.

I don't want to spoil for others, but a couple of the SL16xx ran horrid.  

There are plenty of fixes and it would be nice if Nintendo would take them on.  We shouldn't have hardware in 2025 that goes from 60 directly to 30 fps.

Still a really good game.  But the last few hours were not as polished nor fun.  

VRR on Switch 2 does absolutely need to be fixed, yeah. If that were working properly, then the dips in DK might be smoothly over considerably, not to mention it would open the door to properly paced 40fps modes in Switch 2 games, which would be a nice option to have when possible.

Hopefully it doesn't take as long to be fixed as it did on PS5.

The climax of both Void Kong fights dropped to 30 for me, but what "entire level" are you referring to, cos I don't recall that happening in my playthrough.

What you're describing is double buffer v-sync, which is where if the game can't hit its frame time, it waits for the next screen refresh, which means 60 falls to 30. 

As I understand it, there are a couple of solutions to this; you can submit your frame mid-refresh, resulting in screen tearing; Nintendo seems to really dislike this as none of their games have it.

You can also hold a frame in reserve at all times and permanently run one frame behind; this eliminates both screen tearing and hard drops to 30, but it introduces input lag; Nintendo tends to place a premium on responsive gameplay, so input delay was probably a no-no for them.

VRR of course can fix the issue entirely, but for whatever reason its implementation on Switch 2 currently doesn't work. This is unfortunate, but also not unheard of; VRR on PS5 was busted for more than 4 years before finally being fixed a couple months ago.