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Forums - Nintendo - How Will be Switch 2 Performance Wise?

 

Switch 2 is out! How you classify?

Terribly outdated! 3 5.26%
 
Outdated 1 1.75%
 
Slightly outdated 14 24.56%
 
On point 31 54.39%
 
High tech! 7 12.28%
 
A mixed bag 1 1.75%
 
Total:57
sc94597 on 30 September 2025
HoloDust said:
Yet Deck runs Indiana - what is strange about that it is that, when you compare RTX 3060 and RX 6700, cards that are neck and neck in Outlaws, in Indiana, 3060 is twice as fast as 6700, and easily beats it in most other RT titles. So either Outlaws really likes RDNA2, or it hates Ampere.

It's no secret that Outlaws on Switch 2 goes below PC's low, but to me, all said and done, it seems that it goes fairly below Low and that Ubi did one hell of a job of fine tuning it for Switch 2.

We also need to remember that the APU's don't have infinity cache and a few other architectural differences that are present in the dGPU's. Much of the advantage AMD has in certain titles is largely because of this. An RX 6400 heavily outperforms (as much as +40%) an integrated 780m in many titles, as an example, despite the fact that on paper the RX 6400 should be slightly worse than the 780m. 

The Switch 2 is indeed running certain settings lower than low, but we can say the same for the Series S as well. And again, the setting the Switch 2 chooses to compromise on are either to save CPU resources (which the Steam Deck has no issue with) or to reduce RT like the Series S. 

If even the Series S needs to compromise on RT, I am not sure how one would think a system that is a third as performant (GPU-wise) on the same architecture wouldn't have to do so even more extensively. 

Last edited by sc94597 - on 30 September 2025

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curl-6 on 30 September 2025
HoloDust said:
curl-6 said:

With how well Star Wars Outlaws holds up, and with games like RE Requiem and Indiana Jones on the way, it'll be fun to see what kind of heavyweights the little hybrid can handle.

Alan Wake 2 maybe, Kingdom Come Deliverance II, Plague Tale Requiem, Hellblade II even... it should prove fascinating given the kind of ports devs were able to pull off on the original Switch with its underclocked 2015 Tegra chipset.

Indiana Jones is, at least in PC tests for Ampere based GPUs, much, much lighter than Outlaws - as in at least 2x lighter - so I think Switch 2 shouldn't have problem running it.

Alan Wake 2 can be heavy, but it doesn't require RT.

KCD II runs on potatoes, due to how well optimized CryEngine is.

Plague Tale should also run fine, since it runs on ancient GPUs just fine (my 4th PC still has old RX 570, my wife's daughter played it on it, she loves both Requiems).

Hellblade would be interesting to see, it's quite heavy and uses software Lumen, which, IIRC, is fairly taxing on CPU.

How might Doom The Dark Ages fare?

Doom 2016 and Eternal were iconic Switch 1 ports, it'd be interesting to see the sequel hit Switch 2.

Seems to hit 60fps most of the time on Series S, so with a cut to 30 it should be doable.



sc94597 on 30 September 2025
curl-6 said:
HoloDust said:

Indiana Jones is, at least in PC tests for Ampere based GPUs, much, much lighter than Outlaws - as in at least 2x lighter - so I think Switch 2 shouldn't have problem running it.

Alan Wake 2 can be heavy, but it doesn't require RT.

KCD II runs on potatoes, due to how well optimized CryEngine is.

Plague Tale should also run fine, since it runs on ancient GPUs just fine (my 4th PC still has old RX 570, my wife's daughter played it on it, she loves both Requiems).

Hellblade would be interesting to see, it's quite heavy and uses software Lumen, which, IIRC, is fairly taxing on CPU.

How might Doom The Dark Ages fare?

Doom 2016 and Eternal were iconic Switch 1 ports, it'd be interesting to see the sequel hit Switch 2.

Seems to hit 60fps most of the time on Series S, so with a cut to 30 it should be doable.

I did a sort of "simulation" a while back using an underclocked A1000 (Ampere professional low-profile card.) 30fps with DLSS Performance to Quality mode @1080p was achievable with the launch build. 

sc94597 said:

Been experimenting with Doom Dark Ages on an old Dell Workstation I have with an i7 4770 (1226 single, 3918 multi in GB6)  and an RTX A1000 50W (SFF). The A1000 on paper is 2.2 times a Switch 2 docked and ~4 times a Switch 2 in handheld. I underclocked it to about 65% of its peak performance, making it about +35% Switch 2 docked and 2.5  times Switch 2 handheld. VRAM usage is at about 5.5 GB with everything set to low, system ram usage about 3 GB, resolution is DLSS Performance @1080p. My i7 4770 seems to be bottlenecking it though, so utilization is more like 40% of peak performance rather than 65%. Basically getting a constant 35 FPS with these settings. Game looks very blurry though with nasty artifacts. Quality mode eliminates many of these artifacts but drops the framerate to a variable 27-33 fps. 

Anyway, I think the game is do-able on Switch 2 given this, but it will likely be a port that requires some very tailored optimizations. I am guessing if they do achieve it, it will be a sub-540p/540p -> 1080p 30fps experience docked, and 320p -> 720p 30fps handheld. 

Initially was going to try an A400 since it is closer to Switch 2 Docked (~ 87% of Switch 2 docked performance, was going to overclock to make up the gap, then underclock to near handheld performance) but the VRAM bottleneck made it impossible. 

I wasn't expecting Doom Dark Ages to be this demanding given how well Doom Eternal runs on even weak PC's. 



curl-6 on 30 September 2025
sc94597 said:
curl-6 said:

How might Doom The Dark Ages fare?

Doom 2016 and Eternal were iconic Switch 1 ports, it'd be interesting to see the sequel hit Switch 2.

Seems to hit 60fps most of the time on Series S, so with a cut to 30 it should be doable.

I did a sort of "simulation" a while back using an underclocked A1000 (Ampere professional low-profile card.) 30fps with DLSS Performance to Quality mode @1080p was achievable with the launch build. 

sc94597 said:

Been experimenting with Doom Dark Ages on an old Dell Workstation I have with an i7 4770 (1226 single, 3918 multi in GB6)  and an RTX A1000 50W (SFF). The A1000 on paper is 2.2 times a Switch 2 docked and ~4 times a Switch 2 in handheld. I underclocked it to about 65% of its peak performance, making it about +35% Switch 2 docked and 2.5  times Switch 2 handheld. VRAM usage is at about 5.5 GB with everything set to low, system ram usage about 3 GB, resolution is DLSS Performance @1080p. My i7 4770 seems to be bottlenecking it though, so utilization is more like 40% of peak performance rather than 65%. Basically getting a constant 35 FPS with these settings. Game looks very blurry though with nasty artifacts. Quality mode eliminates many of these artifacts but drops the framerate to a variable 27-33 fps. 

Anyway, I think the game is do-able on Switch 2 given this, but it will likely be a port that requires some very tailored optimizations. I am guessing if they do achieve it, it will be a sub-540p/540p -> 1080p 30fps experience docked, and 320p -> 720p 30fps handheld. 

Initially was going to try an A400 since it is closer to Switch 2 Docked (~ 87% of Switch 2 docked performance, was going to overclock to make up the gap, then underclock to near handheld performance) but the VRAM bottleneck made it impossible. 

I wasn't expecting Doom Dark Ages to be this demanding given how well Doom Eternal runs on even weak PC's. 

Yeah if they do port it, it'll get specific optimizations that can't really be simulated on a PC build; I remember back in 2017 Digital Foundry tried to "test" Doom 2016 on Switch 1 using a low powered PC build, and the results ran way worse than the final game, same when they did it again for Witcher 3 in 2019.

Kinda like how on paper, Star Wars Outlaws shouldn't hold up as well as it does given how it performs on Series S and handheld PCs; hardware-specific tailoring goes a long way.



sc94597 on 30 September 2025
curl-6 said:

Yeah if they do port it, it'll get specific optimizations that can't really be simulated on a PC build; I remember back in 2017 Digital Foundry tried to "test" Doom 2016 on Switch 1 using a low powered PC build, and the results ran way worse than the final game, same when they did it again for Witcher 3 in 2019.

Kinda like how on paper, Star Wars Outlaws shouldn't hold up as well as it does given how it performs on Series S and handheld PCs; hardware-specific tailoring goes a long way.

Yep, the fact it runs pretty well in the simulation, is a good sign given that there definitely will be optimization beyond it.  

Having said that, I still don't think Star Wars Outlaws is unusually performant for the SW2.

If you look at what a 45W RTX 3050 laptop does in the game (60 fps average with DLSS Quality, all low settings @1080p) the fact that the SW2 docked does about half that at a similar internal resolution and with worse-than-low graphics settings makes about sense. An RTX 3050 laptop (@45W) is about 1.4x Switch 2 docked and 2.4x Switch 2 handheld in raw performance. 

You'd actually expect docked mode to do a bit better than it actually does given that, but it is probably keeping parity with portable mode and attempting to achieve more performance than 30fps might introduce a CPU-bottleneck anyway. So they went for as stable a 30fps as possible instead and took the opportunity to target 1440p performance DLSS (rather than 1080p quality DLSS) when docked. 



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HoloDust on 01 October 2025
sc94597 said:
HoloDust said:
Yet Deck runs Indiana - what is strange about that it is that, when you compare RTX 3060 and RX 6700, cards that are neck and neck in Outlaws, in Indiana, 3060 is twice as fast as 6700, and easily beats it in most other RT titles. So either Outlaws really likes RDNA2, or it hates Ampere.

It's no secret that Outlaws on Switch 2 goes below PC's low, but to me, all said and done, it seems that it goes fairly below Low and that Ubi did one hell of a job of fine tuning it for Switch 2.

We also need to remember that the APU's don't have infinity cache and a few other architectural differences that are present in the dGPU's. Much of the advantage AMD has in certain titles is largely because of this. An RX 6400 heavily outperforms (as much as +40%) an integrated 780m in many titles, as an example, despite the fact that on paper the RX 6400 should be slightly worse than the 780m. 

The Switch 2 is indeed running certain settings lower than low, but we can say the same for the Series S as well. And again, the setting the Switch 2 chooses to compromise on are either to save CPU resources (which the Steam Deck has no issue with) or to reduce RT like the Series S. 

If even the Series S needs to compromise on RT, I am not sure how one would think a system that is a third as performant (GPU-wise) on the same architecture wouldn't have to do so even more extensively. 

If we were talking about pretty much any other RT game, I would agree with you, since Ampere is easily beating RDNA2 in them. This one, no. Actually, AC:Shadows is good example of another game where, even with RT, Ampere is struggling against RDNA2, even more so than in Outlaws. Actually, in AC:Shadows all nVidia cards perform quite a bit worse than in Outlaws vs their AMD counterparts.

And AC:Shadows runs on Deck, even with "Global Illumination everywhere" option. Yeah, it kinda looks like dog shit with that turned on, due to lack of DLSS, but it runs on Deck and is sort of (though barely) custom build. No wonder, also Ubisoft game - for some reason, Ubi's games really love AMD GPUs.

So, as I said, I'm not convinced. Now, given that they've done it for AC:Shadows, maybe Ubi will do something for the Deck in Outlaws as well - at least to some degree, if not really going all the way, like with Switch 2 port. If not...well, we'll be left to speculate what the bottleneck was.



curl-6 on 01 October 2025

Speaking of AC Shadows, that's one game I'd be very interested to see come to Switch 2.

Not to play, as it looks like typical Ubisoft slop, but just in terms of it being a potentially fascinating port.



HoloDust on 01 October 2025
curl-6 said:
HoloDust said:

Indiana Jones is, at least in PC tests for Ampere based GPUs, much, much lighter than Outlaws - as in at least 2x lighter - so I think Switch 2 shouldn't have problem running it.

Alan Wake 2 can be heavy, but it doesn't require RT.

KCD II runs on potatoes, due to how well optimized CryEngine is.

Plague Tale should also run fine, since it runs on ancient GPUs just fine (my 4th PC still has old RX 570, my wife's daughter played it on it, she loves both Requiems).

Hellblade would be interesting to see, it's quite heavy and uses software Lumen, which, IIRC, is fairly taxing on CPU.

How might Doom The Dark Ages fare?

Doom 2016 and Eternal were iconic Switch 1 ports, it'd be interesting to see the sequel hit Switch 2.

Seems to hit 60fps most of the time on Series S, so with a cut to 30 it should be doable.

That one is actually less demanding than Outlaws, though it doesn't scale as well from Low to Max settings as games usually do. But...it runs on Deck, so I think it's more than doable.



HoloDust on 01 October 2025
curl-6 said:

Speaking of AC Shadows, that's one game I'd be very interested to see come to Switch 2.

Not to play, as it looks like typical Ubisoft slop, but just in terms of it being a potentially fascinating port.

Ubisoft used to be very creative...back in days...and then incurable disease know as Annualis Sequelitis struck their HQ... 



curl-6 on 01 October 2025
HoloDust said:
curl-6 said:

Speaking of AC Shadows, that's one game I'd be very interested to see come to Switch 2.

Not to play, as it looks like typical Ubisoft slop, but just in terms of it being a potentially fascinating port.

Ubisoft used to be very creative...back in days...and then incurable disease know as Annualis Sequelitis struck their HQ... 

Yeah it's a shame, they used to make such great stuff. Still, they have some talented engineers under their roof, an AC Shadows port would be interesting as a technical piece.

I'd also be keen to see them try on Avatar as it shares a lot of its DNA with outlaws, coming from the same dev and engine.