That tablet pc is a very niche product, which will sell at most several tens of thousands of units. It is not comparable to a product that has to sell tens of millions of units.

It is an absurd example, in terms of size, price, functionality...

Yes, I have that sort of special controller for tablet and I have 10 inch tablet. Not even that one would I call gaming handheld, let alone 13.4" one (have you ever held 13 inch laptop in your hands?), that even in silent mode draws 40W on a battery of 70Wh. 

It indeed is a great tablet/laptop, if you don't mind sub hour AAA gaming without a charger, specifically cause of that AMD's AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 SOC that is, apparently, as good as desktop 4060 (which is better than PS5), but that is not current handheld tech, though it might become in the future on smaller node.

Yep it's not designed to sell tens of millions like the Switch 2 is you're right about that. The Switch 2 is basically an 8 inch tablet with detachable Joycons though so they're not as far apart as you're making out. I'm just saying if Asus can make a 13" tablet that can rival PS5 power then it should be possible to make an 8" tablet that can rival the XBSS?

I'm using a 12" tablet now and I don't think it would make a comfortable handheld so I have to agree with you on that one. It's selling very well from what I can see, so maybe they will start doing smaller versions? If they can beat PS5 performance with 13" maybe they can still beat XBSS with 8/10"? 

For me, any portable/handheld bought today needs to run oblivion remastered, and I'm not sure Switch 2 could run it. Skyrim was a launch game with Switch 1 so clearly the interest and the intent was there to have the elder scrolls on Switch. We haven't heard anything about Oblivion remastered coming to Switch 2 though. I hope it does. 

At what price, with what battery life, thickness, and fan noise? If it's so simple, why don't other manufacturers do it?

The answer is that there is no market for what you are asking for, no market at the price and with the limitations it would have.

I am able to get the game to run well on an i7 4790 (11 year old CPU that is within 20% of Switch 2's) + RTX A400 at 1080p with DLSS performance. This GPU falls in between the handheld and docked modes of Switch 2 in terms of compute, but is VRAM starved. 

I don't see why Switch 2 wouldn't be able to run it. 

Keep in mind that the Steam Deck is several years old, you would hope a device releasing in 2025 would beat it.

And obviously the OLED on the OLED Steam Deck is in a league of it's own, comparing my Switch 2 and Switch OLED in some games, I would prefer to play some games on the Switch 1 OLED panel... Same precedent would exist for the Steamdeck OLED, it's just a better display and games look better on it.


The Switch 2 falls between the Steam Deck and Rog Ally X... And that's perfectly fine... But where the Rog Ally X will pull ahead is in memory constrained scenarios, the 12GB in the Switch 2 and the 16GB in the Streamdeck just doesn't let the hardware breathe especially as game VRAM sizes are ballooning these days.

Ram. Oblivion Remastered loves it's Ram... It's using 7.5GB System Ram on my System and over 13GB of VRAM, granted that's at Ultra with no upscaling.

Oblivion remastered *should* scale down towards the Switch 2 as it can run on the Steamdeck, but it might be a fairly janky experience due to the limited 9GB of Ram on the Switch 2, which will necessitate streaming assets from much slower storage... Which has actually been the achilles heel of most of the Elder Scrolls games on consoles. (Oblivion on 360, Skyrim on PS3)

Obviously you will lose visual flairs like Lumen Hardware Global Illumination and the need to use DLSS as a crutch.

Oblivion remastered looks incredible on high end hardware... But a light game it is not when things are dialed up.

In Short... Any games that runs on a Steamdeck, Rog Ally X, Playstation 4 or Xbox Series S should run on Switch 2, it's just what sacrifices, changes or optimizations that need to be done to get it there.

If these are your argument points... Then no one would buy a Switch 2 over a Switch 1 OLED.

1) Switch OLED is smaller and more portable.
2) Switch OLED has same thickness.
3) Switch OLED has better battery life.
4) Switch OLED has a better display.
5) Switch OLED is cheaper.
6) Switch OLED has cheaper games.
7) Switch OLED has more games.

It's about the entire package... And let's be honest. Nintendo hardware doesn't sell due to just the hardware, it sells because of the games.

The Rog Ally X and Steamdeck are amazing pieces of hardware, but they appeal to a certain demographic just like the Switch 2 appeals to a certain demographic.
There is no wrong purchase with any of these, gamers are going to gravitate towards their own preferences and what provides them with the dopamine hit.

They can't really, at least not with what's available right now. Even the latest AMD's offerings, like AI Z2 Extreme, have 128bit bus with max LPDDR5X 8000, so 128GB/s memory bandwidth, which will be its bottleneck.

AI Max+ 395 (as well as 390 and 385) have 256bit bus with LPDDR5X 8000, so 256GB/s, but they are integrated solutions for laptops, aimed at higher TDPs (45-120W), not for handhelds.

Technically, yes, you could've designed SOC with current tech that has 192-bit bus (you want to go as low as you can with bus width on such a small devices) and put brand spanking new Samsung LPDDR5X 10700 for same speed, and then use even something like older Z1 Extreme equivalent to beat XSS. But that would cost pretty penny - there is obviously reason why AMD hasn't still made such chips for handhelds, even if they have those integrated solutions for laptops that can beat PS5.

Could've nVidia done it? Sure. Again, it would cost arm and a leg.

We're not at those nodes yet. With 2nm node and LPDDR6 (which can't come soon enough to solve the main problem all those SOCs have), most likely. So, currently, technically yes, practically no.

Nintendo - hard no, that is not their modus operandi. The best they could've done is go with Samsung's 5N, for better performance per W and put 30Wh battery inside it and let it run at 15W handheld/30W docked, with slight hit to their profits ($20, at most). And that's where we'll agree, SW2 could've been somewhat better for the same price, but not unrealistically better, as you might be suggesting.

That's not what we were talking about. Switch 2 has a very noticeable performance improvement over Switch. We already have many people complaining about the price of the console, what I was pointing out is that if a manufacturer developed a console with the specifications necessary to address his complaints, we would end up with a much higher price and larger dimensions, with a much shorter battery life.

The price of nodes at TSMC have skyrocketed with each node reduction, especially with multi deep ultraviolet layer nodes, which means that the hardware would skyrocket in price if you increased the performance to that of a Series S in a physical format the size of Switch 2.

In any design, you have limitations in terms of price, dimensions, cooling, power consumption... and Nintendo has chosen the option they feel most comfortable with among all the ones they had, including the compatibility advantages of continuing with Nvidia. No one can beat the limitations imposed by physics.

Even with the ram limitations I think it wouldn't be too difficult to get an adequate (not great but playeable) experience.

The Haswell i7 + RTX A400 system I was talking  about only has 8 GB of DDR3 (and the RTX A400 has 4 GB of VRAM) and I am able to get a consistent 1080p 40fps DLSS performance on it with low/med settings.

That is a low internal resolution but par for the course with the Switch 2 and doesn't look too bad. 

Edit: Plus the Series S runs the game adequately, of course.

So it's only performance that is the selling point?

So you agree then based on performance that the Rog Ally X is the better buy?

It would be a pretty janky experience with only 8GB System + 4GB VRAM. - Playable, but janky.

We also need to remember that technologies like DLSS also tends to gobble up Ram... And the Switch 2 only has 9GB of the stuff available for gaming, just slightly more than your System Ram.

Your Quadro is basically half a Nintendo Switch in terms of GPU resources, so it's actually pretty impressive you are getting 1080P, 40fps... Albeit with DLSS. I don't imagine you are pushing any visual settings though.

But like I alluded to prior... Any game that can run on a Playstation 4 or Xbox Series S, should have no technical reasons on why it couldn't run on the Switch 2 just fine, there will be downgrades in some areas, upgrades in others to work within the strengths/weaknesses of the Switch 2, but it's more than feasible.