Nintendo Switch 2 vs Steam Deck OLED

Hm...that's interesting piece of info. Aren't Switch 2 game cards something like 900-1000MB/s? That is faster than SATA SSDs (which are around 550MB/s), and they don't seem to have problems with Outlaws on PC.

I couldn't find a good source on the speed of Switch 2 game cards. The full quote from the dev was:

"Snowdrop relies heavily on disk streaming for its open world environments, and we found the Switch 2 cards simply didn’t give the performance we needed at the quality target we were going for. I don’t recall the cost of the cards ever entering the discussion - probably because it was moot.

I think if we’d designed a game for Switch 2 from the ground up it might have been different. As it was, we’d build a game around the SSDs of the initial target platforms, and then the Switch 2 came along a while later. In this case I think our leadership made the right call."

Yeah, after some digging I could only do the math via loading speeds vs Lexar and SanDisk SDEX cards, and it comes around ~700MB/s...which is still faster than SATA SSDs.

Then again, I don't have a game, so can't test SSD vs NVMe, but yeah, we might be finally in the era where not having really fast storage is a big issue if perfectly smooth performance is the key, and it seems that was the case with Outlaws.

Switch 2 wipes the floor with the Steam Deck OLED version. It's too bad you can't lock the night/day cycle in the game so you could get exactly the same time of day in game for exact lighting comp, but this isn't even close, the Steam Deck OLED version is like a trainwreck. The Switch 2 version looks like it has a lot more foliage on the terrain of the open world area too (higher setting?) and better lighting/reflections in the indoor areas. 

Also Deck OLED needs to pull 22+ watts just to get that performance which looks it leaves the Steam Deck OLED with just 1 hour of battery life, the Switch 2 is operating on 10 watts. And if you dock the Switch 2, this gap becomes worse for Steam Deck OLED. Keep in mind too Steam Deck OLED also got a die shrink and performance boost to TSMC 6nm, so the fact that it's being smoked by Samsung 8nm says either Samsung's 8nm is better than we thought or the Switch 2 is really, really well optimized hardware. 

Very nice! A clear win for the Switch 2.

The only problem I have... I don't really trust that guy about being unbiased after some shit he pulled in his Hogwarts Legacy comparisons:

In the portable mode video, he sets everything to "low" on Steam Deck and uses the worst upscaler of this game (FSR1) and doesn't activate HDR, probably to show a very bad video quality on the Steam Deck. Then he hides these stupid settings with an 30 fps lock... without it, the fps would be way over 60 fps, probably around the 90 fps limit of the Steam Deck OLED. Medium to high settings + FSR 3 (or XESS) + HDR on would have been a much better choice for a comparison.

In another Hogwarts comparison he sets the Steam Deck to native 4K to show performance problems and then makes it appear, that the Switch 2 also runs in 4K:

Here, a comparison with the Steam Deck in 1440p would have been a lot fairer, since the Switch 2 version runs docked with "up to 1440p".

So I wouldn't put it beneath that guy, if his Steam Deck footage of Star Wars Outlaws would have some settings to make the Steam Deck look extra bad... f. e. running the game from a slow microSD card instead of running it from the internal SSD to increase stutters.

Seems somewhat in line with this:

Steam Deck frame rate drops into the mid-20s as soon as you get on the speeder bike at about 7 minutes in and it has the same kind of stutter drop to single digit FPS momentarily here too and then it drops under 20 fps as you continue on the speeder bike. He does change the upscaling method to Intel XeSS at one point but the frame rate tanks again as soon as he gets on the bike (sub 20 fps at times). 

Just as an aside I'm really thinking about buying Outlaws now, lol. The music and atmosphere of the game seems really, really top notch and the game play seems fun too. I don't give a fart about the discourse of the main character being a woman.

I played a couple hours, it's very formulaic but enjoyable enough if you're into the whole third-person-sneaky-action-game template, and the technical trimmings to run on Switch 2 never spoil the experience.

For me, a lot of the enjoyment was in the technical aspect, as these kind of ports are an interest of mine.

It looks like we found a game where the use of the game key cards is perfectly understandable and not something to complain about.