You locked yourself inside since 2017 for a pandemic, which outbreak was declared in 2020?

Also the number of active Steam users HASN'T declined since the end of the pandemic; both concurrent users and concurrent in-game stats have set new records this year:

Your narrative that many people only bought new graphic cards because they were a bit cheaper after the crypto crash is very weak.

Figured I would post some graphs of GPU performance from my favorite tech site, so people can get a good idea of where the current gen consoles are at compared to PC GPU's. The above graph is an average framerate across a test suite of 9 rasterization games at 1080p Ultra settings, while the bottom graph is the average FPS across 6 ray tracing games at 1080p medium settings with RT on. This is the average framerate without using any upscaling tech like DLSS, XESS, or FSR.

PS5 seems to be closest in specs to the Radeon 6650, Series X probably around 6700, Series S somewhere around the 6500 XT.

Meanwhile, the Digital Foundry analysis of the leaked Switch 2 specs pegged it as a weaker version of the 2050. The 2050 is not on the above graphs because it is a mobile GPU and Tom's Hardware only put Desktop GPU's on the graph, but if it was on there it would be on roughly the same line as Intel's Arc a380 and AMD's RX 6500 XT on the rasterization graph and about equal to the a380 on the Ray Tracing graph, as  user testing shows that the 2050 mobile gets roughly 40-50% of the framerate of the 3050 desktop on most games (scroll down to where the games that have been tested on both GPU's are). But that is the full 2050, Digital Foundry halved the core clock frequency of the 2050 from a 1477mhz down to 750mhz for their testing in order to bring it's performance as close as possible to where Switch 2 likely will be at if it's on 8nm (T239 has about 25% fewer CUDA cores than 2050m, so they had to reduce clocks by about 25% to equal that, and the other 25% reduction in clock rate was in order to hit the optimal performance/watt for the T234 at 8nm). So, we should be looking at something like 25% of the performance of a desktop 3050 on Switch 2 in terms of raw specs if it is 8nm.

However, there are a few points in Switch 2's favor:

• System level optimizations by developers that no PC port receives
• Switch 2 should have more RAM available to devs than the 2050m's 4GB, probably at least 6GB available to devs and possibly even more
• DLSS Performance mode looks better visually than the competing FSR performance mode, and will be able to boost framerates substantially
• While DLSS AI frame generation is currently exclusive to Ada Lovelace (40 series GPU's), while Switch 2's GPU is a generation behind being an Ampere part, it was originally reported that Switch 2's GPU has a partial Ada Lovelace feature set, so it may be able to use DLSS frame generation

It's also possible that the T239 chipset in Switch 2 is clocked faster than Digital Foundry based their testing around, especially when docked. They purposefully went with an extremely low clock rate of 750 mhz due to a belief that Switch 2 may be using the Samsung 8nm process, they said that any faster on 8nm and Switch 2 would get too hot and use too much battery life. If Switch 2 has moved to 4 or 5nm however, they should be able to clock it alot faster, moving it's docked performance closer to the full 2050m and also pushing up handheld performance and battery life. 

Crypto was starting to boom big time in 2017/2018 sure. My neighbor went down that rabbit hole and eventually had like 7 30-series GPUs thinking he was going to be the next big crypto bros. and could upgrade his Porsche 911 to a Lambo, ended up having to sell them off for like half what he paid about a year ago. 

The fact of the matter is GPU sales have collapsed in the last 12+ months or so, it coincides exactly with people coming out of the pandemic and crypto mining going belly up. 

Fuck a GPU, the best Nvidia buy I ever made was buying about 2 grand of their stock in 2019, it's worth a lot more than what I paid for today. Only regret is I didn't buy a lot more. 

Yup same company that released the wii and wiiu, one was a GC repackaged with some upgrades hardware wise and the other could not even run most ports better then 360. Then you have the most reliable leaker saying it's 8nm and sounding sure about it and now 8 inch screen rumor and i would say it's 90% gonna be 8nm chip.

Furukawa was president of Nintendo back in 2005? I must have missed that. Their management is completely different, their market position is also different, their market needs are also different. In early 2017 they released a portable with one of the most powerful portable chipsets available at the time (Tegra X1 was comparable at to an Apple A9X in $700 iPad Pros).

Sorry i'm not seeing this huge difference. they got the switch chipset cause by reports they got a amazing deal and the chipset was basically  useless to nvda, and cause the wiiu died prematurely. The fact that Nintendo never released a pro in all this time tells me they have not changed. switch has been super out dated for mobile  hardware since 2020.

The biggest advantage of the switch 2 is Nintendo games and their graphical style.  Pikmin, Luigi, Mario, metroid and zelda won't eat vram or bandwidth like Cyberpunk or GTA.  A 2050 is going to be plenty for 1st party games.  

As for 3rd party games, the story hasn't changed since the first page.  Game engines are scalable and ports are easier than ever.  Being OK with the sacrifices that will occur on a 2050 versus a ps5, that a personal decision.

The Wii could get away with having low end hardware because they had a freaking revolution for a controller that rendered the hardware irrelevant. 

It's like saying "well my mom was a supermodel, so that means I get to be a supermodel too" ... yeah well hold the phone for a second there, first of all, are you even good looking? If the answer is actually you ended up just being average looking, well then no, you're not going to have the same career your parent did, sorry to break reality to you. 

They were able to get away with things with the Wii and DS that they cannot get away with in the current market, even as is, the Switch 2 will have to be a massive upgrade over the Switch 1, not just a little one, otherwise people are going to say "nah, don't need it", unless they have some kind of incredible game play innovation ... but as I said above that's hard to pull out of your butt on demand. 

Those kinds of things, like the Wiimote, are R&D miracles that happen maybe once every 20-30 years if you're lucky, Nintendo hit it big twice on touch/motion controls, but as we saw with 3DS and Wii U, they weren't able to replicate that success because hardware gimmicks don't work linearly like that. Just because you did it once or even twice, there is no guarantee your third and fourth attempts will yield the same result. 

If Switch 2 is for 2024 what Switch 1 was for early 2017 (top end mobile chipset), that will be more than fine. If Nintendo put a shit chip in there for Switch 1 that was like 1/3 the performance, the system would have sold less than the 3DS IMO, a large part of the appeal is that it can play big, console style games along with other types of games together on one platform. With Switch 2 I think they probably have to lean more heavily into that, not less, because in 2024 saying "tada! hybrid console" isn't the same "wow" moment as it was in 2017 alone. They raised the bar, now they are going to have to keep topping it. 

Dude the switch sales started exploding in 2020 and when the hardware was already extremely dated even as mobile chipset . I don' see a huge part of the appeal is playing big consoles games as none of those have even cracked 5 million, i think the appeal was the hardware could actually do nintendo games justice on a handheld and can alos be played at home, if anything switch  really proves it's user base could care less about graphics as its still selling great while being extremely dated tech since 2020 and many have the big console games don't even come to switch.

Nintendo just has to hope another pandemic comes along right when they're releasing the next Animal Crossing. 

Fact is linear hardware upgrades have been hard for Nintendo, even SNES from NES was more of a pain in the ass than they bargained for I think, in the US a lot of people did the whole "well Super Mario World doesn't look much better than Mario 3" for a while and then they got into an unexpected mud fight with Sega which seemed dead to rights just a couple of years earlier. 

For a linear hardware upgrade to work (when you don't have a Wii or DS touch monopoly miracle) you basically have to upgrade the hardware very well. 

Because otherwise people will just go "wait ... what's so great about this? I already have a Switch". No hardware manufacturer in the history of this business has been able to do a linear hardware upgrade that was a mediocre hardware upgrade unless they had some miracle control gimmick. 

Which frankly I don't think Nintendo has. Switch 2 is just going to be a Switch 1 with a graphics upgrade. As such, the graphics upgrade has to be pretty substantial, it can't be half assed.