Yeah, I'm leaning toward bullshit detector being in the red as well, but I'd love to see DF (or someone else) do the controlled tests of SATA SSDs and NVMEs in Outlaws.

What is even the point though in this case? You're still just moving data from one format to another and this idea of "the full game is on a cart tho!" isn't even true because those carts/discs still require updates almost all of the time, so the full game is never on the format. 

This only works for Blu-Ray based games too because pressing a Blu-Ray costs on 5 cents. A 64GB, 400MB/sec cartridge, which is shitty performance, but even that costs $16. That's a huge difference. 

If Switch 2 third party games end up costing $15 more on average than their PS5/XSS counterparts, it would kill the Switch 2 ecosystem and for basically nothing. You're paying a massive premium to play a game off a cart and it's literally the worst (slowest) way to play a Switch 2 game. 

Could someone that has purchased Outlaws on Switch 2 take a look at how much battery life do you get while running it?

The vast majority of physical PS5 games don't require updating/connecting to the internet, but apparently it's not the case for Star Wars Outlaws and some (all?) modern Ubisoft games (what's their excuse I wonder?). People hate game key cards because there is nothing in them, they're glorified digital codes.

But yes, the high cartridge cost is a legit problem and I actually lean towards respecting Nintendo's choice here if they truly have no alternatives like mass produced cheaper/lower capacity cartridges.

I believe it's right around 2 hours. 

In light of this, I'd love to see the same team port over Massive's other recent showcase, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.

It's made on the same engine, has a similar performance profile on PS5/Xbox Series, and uses a lot of the same technology.

It would be a challenging port, but the nerd in me would love to see it.

You know the other thing the Switch 2 doesn't get enough credit for? It's running these big ticket games at significantly better battery life than these other PC handhelds. 

I noticed in the Star Wars Outlaws testing on Steam Deck OLED vs. Switch 2, the Steam Deck OLED capped out at just about an hour of battery life for worse game performance. The Switch 2 can get about 2 full hours. That's considering too that Steam Deck OLED is 6nm TSMC while Switch 2 is 8nm Samsung. 

Here's Cyberpunk 2077 on the Switch 2 as well vs. ROG Ally and you can see the Switch 2 has significantly better battery life, like almost double the battery life:

Not only is this system significantly outperforming a lot of these devices, but it also provides way better battery life. 

Overall it's becoming more and more clear this is an outstanding result relative to what expectations could have been 2-3 years ago. This is a very, very good hardware result and definitely not some junk budget system that's heavily compromised, it outperforms more expensive PC handhelds while providing better battery life and a significantly thinner form factor to boot. 

The fact that its getting this from an 8nm SoC is almost like magic, they must have optimized the shit out of that chip. 

It's a shit excuse. There are work arounds for it if the card isn't able to maintain transfer rates.
That is... Build a small buffer, akin to a virtual page file on the Switch 2's internal storage drive, which can then be used for streaming assets from Cart onto the internal drive, which can then stream to DRAM... In-fact you could stream from cart and internal storage at the same time for even more performance. Theoretically.

Ironically you can actually get StarWars Outlaws to run on a PC with a mechanical HDD, although you get significant texture popping... Sata SSD's run the game fine on PC... Which may tell us that the issue may not actually be a sustained read/write bottleneck, it might be random read/write being a bottleneck.

The number I saw on Switch 2 game cartridges is 400MB/sec, which is significantly slower than internal storage or even SD Card Express.

You're not likely to get much faster than that without the cartridge costing even more. Cartridges are all fun and games until they get too expensive and someone (usually the consumer) has to pay the overhead for their cost.

The irony of course is the main advantage cartridges had was it used to be the fastest storage speed available, nowadays it's the slowest. Got people begging to pay a premium so they can have the worst possible experience, lol. 

Personally, I don't have a problem with digital; I am all digital on all platforms. But I don't get why third party simply don't charge $100 for game on cart. I think a lot of physical only type folks would pay it.