So what type of first year titles are we looking at in this scenario? With no 3DS, would some of its less demanding titles like Steel Diver have been developed as late DS titles instead? Would some of these titles been a bit more ambitious and release later on Switch? Would some late life Wii titles like Skyward Sword be cross-gen? Would we get things like Mario 3D Land in 2011 & World in 2013 or just a single game in 2012 that falls right in between the two in terms of size/scope?

I’ll go with

November 2011-Skyward Sword, Nintendogs+Cats
February 2012-Pilotwings Resort
March 2012-Mario Party 9
May 2012-Star Fox 64 Remastered
June 2012-Mario Tennis Open
August 2012-Kid Icarus Uprising
September 2012-Super Mario 3D Land
October 2012-Nintendo Land
November 2012-Mario Kart 7

It's tough to predict, but yeah let's say for the sake of argument their 3DS/Wii U output is roughly amalgamated, with the next 3D Mario being similar to 3D Land/World but in a single game, same for Mario Kart.

Sounds strange to think there would be an alternate timeline where a Mario Kart 7 on steroids would be as dope as MK8.

Here's Transformer Pad Infinity with DDR3-1600 (6.4GB/s)

https://www.anandtech.com/show/6073/the-google-nexus-7-review/5

I think even if you account for everything else, 543MP4 is just much, much faster than Tegra 3.

The lower technological specifications would have sped up development times, so Nintendo would have got games out faster than they did in the Wii U and 3DS reality. The combined software output would have also avoided/mitigated droughts. I don't think that the level of graphics would have done much to hurt sales, because sales of Nintendo games and hardware aren't driven by graphics to begin with.

The biggest key point of this alternate reality is that Nintendo would have continued the Wii direction instead of abandoning it. Firstly, the standard controller would have still been a motion controller. Secondly, games would have been developed in accordance to that; doesn't mean that all games would have had motion controls, because that wasn't the case on the Wii either. Thirdly, Nintendo would have achieved a different value proposition for its console.

So there is a number of blatantly obvious benefits here and I doubt such a system would have sold under 100 million units in its lifetime, plus Nintendo would have been able to keep having Nintendo-like profits throughout the generation (defined by Iwata as a minimum of 100 billion yen a year). However, there are also obvious disadvantages for this hypothetical earlier Switch in comparison to the actual Switch that launched in 2017.

The first one is the technology. While the Wii had Xenoblade Chronicles to prove what scope it is capable of (XC wasn't even a big budget game, mind you), it wouldn't have been able to output Breath of the Wild in its actual form. So we'll have to take one system seller away here, but we do have plenty of others of the Wii U and 3DS era, because people would have actually liked to buy the hardware as opposed to the Wii U and 3DS where this wasn't the case.

The second one is the elimination of Sony in the handheld market that hadn't happened yet. In the actual year 2018 it began to show that Sony's exit really forced the hands of third parties, so the actual Switch picked up lots of third party support to bolster its library for years to come. Sony's Vita received more third party support than the 3DS in Japan in the period from 2014 to 2016 despite Sony's handheld being locked in a very distant second place, so I wouldn't think that a hypothetical 2011 Switch would have fared that much better, because we have the evidence that sales data alone wasn't enough to sway third parties, so the absence of Sony altogether was a necessity. The 2011 Switch would have seen a reasonable good amount of third party support (because we know that's what the 3DS got), but it would have been a far cry from what the real Switch got.

The 2011 Switch would have eliminated Sony from the handheld market just like it happened in reality, because Sony's problems would have remained the same: Lack of commitment from Sony themselves, smartphones making multimedia features of the Vita obsolete as a selling point, third parties (especially in the USA and Europe) banking on smartphones replacing gaming handhelds altogether (resulting in lack of commitment). So in this timeline it would only be the Switch successor to reap the benefits, likely scheduled for a late 2017 launch, giving the 2011 Switch a full six years on the market.

Assuming that 2011 Switch sold similar numbers as 2017 Switch, I’m curious if the perception of success would be different.

2017 Switch will sell 150+ million after 3DS/Wii U sold ~90 million but 2011 Switch would be coming after DS/Wii which sold ~255 million.

I wonder if that would have caused people to view it as underperforming.

As for 3rd party support, if 2011 Switch had similar power as Vita than I wonder if that would have caused both platforms to have better support. 3DS & Vita had some multiplat titles but for the most part games were either 3DS or Vita.

It's certain that the perception would be different, but that's because there are plenty of people who don't understand business properly. I mean, there are even people who believe that the PS3 was successful, because the only thing they look at is unit sales. Also, in our reality it has been repeatedly brought up that Switch, despite all its success, will fall far short of the combined DS+Wii unit sales. But this line of argument doesn't work against Switch when the sales of software units is in the same ballpark as DS+Wii combined and Nintendo's profits are also in the same league. The logical conclusion here is that much of the decline in hardware units was caused by the elimination of the need to buy two separate systems.

Regarding third party support, it's probable that there would have been more multiplatform games, but at the same time doubtful that that would have moved the needle much for either system, because the number of big third party sellers that the actual 3DS and Vita got was pretty small.

And the major other point regarding perception of success would be the elimination of Sony from the handheld market. So in the hypothetical scenario we would be looking at something like half as many Switch units sold as DS+Wii combined, but with a bright future outlook for third party support. Not only because of the lack of a Sony handheld, but also because third parties as a whole were realizing that smartphone gaming doesn't work as replacement for handheld gaming.

Again, you posted offscreen rendering that favors PowerVR. Also the Infinity only came with 1GB of Ram, not 2GB.



This paints a very different picture... And harkens back to several posts back that it would be hard to tell them a part.
Also note the Tegra 3 running at a higher resolution than the top two iPads. (Which are always performant due to Apples Metal API and OS optimizations, the lower resolution just helps.)

In anything fillrate intensive, Tegra 3 would win anyway if it had full bandwidth and 2GB of Ram.
It's going to be hard to tell them a part though.

A dock could provide the extra capability to boost GPU clocks by a good amount.

We need to remember that Tegra has never been the market leader in ARM SoC's, it's never even been the fastest chip... But when you see what developers can do by leveraging nVidia's development environment... That's what sets them apart.

I.E. Playing Shadowgun on Tegra which is a Tegra Enhanced game (nVidia THG), gives us full geometry and textured vegetation instead of sprites, improved shaders etc'.
Sonic 4 off the Tegra zone also has improved visuals borrowed from the XBLA and PSN releases and comes very close to the Xbox 360/Playstation 3 releases in many aspects.

Making games look good is not always about having the most performance, it's often about having the best development tools to make the process more efficient.

I don't think Skyward Sword and Mario Kart 7 are system sellers the way Breath of the Wild and Mario Kart 8 were, they don't have the same kind of scope and as such aren't nearly as impressive software wise. 

I also doubt 2GB of RAM would have happened, Nintendo originally wanted 1GB of RAM for the *Switch*, lol, go look up the Nintendo NX leaked documents, it was supposed to have a 480p screen + 1GB of RAM total.

People are lucky they didn't go with that crap Eriksson chipset + 1GB RAM.

2011-ish was just a bad time for Nintendo, people were too caught up in the initial wave of smartphone/tablet (iPad had just launched) frenzy, that was the new, hot, "must have it" shit of the time and the Wii/DS audience didn't want to hear any different. They were in love with their shiny new Apple toys and it would take a few years for that novelty to become normalized. 

2017 was a lot more hospitable, everyone and their grandma had gotten their fill of iPad so that it wasn't as special anymore and even PS4/XB1 were aging by then, it was the right time, it had enough horsepower under the hood to be at least decently convincing as a home console (not just a handheld with TV output), etc. etc. I think people underestimate how much changes if you change several major aspects of a system, because the logic is "well we only changed about 20% of the basic concept, that means at worst you should only lose about 20% of the sales" ... that's not how reality really works. 

You can alter things just slightly and it completely throw the entire thing off balance. 

But the onscreen benchmarks are useless for the fast GPUs which can render the sequence much faster than 60 fps but are v-sync-limited by the 60 Hz displays.

Another advantage of the offscreen benchmarks is that they are benched all in the same resolution (in this case 1280x720, other GFXBenchmarks like T-Rex up to 1080p and Aztec up to 4K), no matter the different native resolutions of the displays.