Nintendo Switch 2 won’t keep up with other consoles — but that doesn’t matter

We have all been waiting for the Switch 2 for a long time, and now that it’s here, there’s a lot to analyze and a lot of different angles to consider. We need to know who this device is for, what it will be good at, what it’s competing against, and how it compares to that competition.

This isn’t as simple as one might expect, however. There are a lot of different platforms and devices we can use to play video games and each has its own focuses, strengths, and weaknesses. There’s no objective winner and no “do it all” device that can give you the best results in every department.

That said, where does the Switch 2 stand and is it a device you should be interested in? Let’s have a look.

What should we compare the Switch 2 to?

In the past, it’s been pretty pointless to compare Nintendo consoles to other consoles on the market because they always had very different goals. While it made sense to choose between a PlayStation 3 or an Xbox 360 rather than buying both, it did not make sense to throw the Wii into that mix. If you wanted to play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 — you chose between Sony and Microsoft, because the experience on Wii is not comparable. If you wanted to play Call of Duty and the latest Mario, then the only sensible option was to buy two consoles.

It was the same kind of deal with the original Switch — its two big focuses were first-party games and its handheld/docked hybrid concept. The PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One X, on the other hand, focused on power, next-gen visuals, and AAA games.

The Switch 2, however, has turned the tables a little bit. With 4K output, a 120Hz HDR display, and both DLSS and ray-tracing capabilities, Nintendo has gone from zero to 100 when it comes to AAA game buzzwords. The market also looks different now since, alongside the PlayStations and Xboxes, we also have a load of different handheld gaming PCs to choose from.

This puts lots of people into slightly unknown territory. The Nintendo-only kind of gamers now need to learn what all these new buzzwords mean and decide if they should upgrade, and the AAA gamers need to find out if Nintendo has made something they’ll actually be interested in now. The third “play a bit of everything” kind of gamer is the only one whose position stays the same, really — to play a bit of everything, we buy a bit of everything.

For instance, I currently have five Switch consoles in my two-person household and two Switch 2 consoles preordered. We also have a Steam Deck, an OLED Steam Deck, a PlayStation 5, a PlayStation 5 Pro, and a desktop with a Ryzen 9 7950X3D 16-Core CPU, 128GB DDR4 memory, 4TB of NVMe storage, and an Nvidia RTX 4090 GPU.

And it’s not as overkill as it sounds — I have a Nintendo Switch to play Nintendo games and other Switch games, I have a Steam Deck to play the games the Switch doesn’t have, and I have a PlayStation 5 for AAA games.

To give the short answer to the “What should we compare the Switch 2 to?” question, my answer would be other handheld devices. There’s no point comparing it (or any other handheld) to a gaming desktop since the realms of possibility are just too different when you have unlimited energy and space for all the cooling you need. Just look at the numbers on the desktop I just mentioned — in fact, let me throw them into a table alongside one of the most powerful handhelds we’ve got at the moment, the Asus ROG Ally X.

If you don’t know loads about PC components, just have a look at the numbers — it’s no competition. If you want your games to look and play at their absolute best, you’ve got to spend a small fortune and only ever play at a desk because it will suck up enough energy to kill a handheld battery in 30 seconds. If you want a little more freedom, then it’s time to bring your expectations down a little bit.

Switch 2 vs Steam Deck OLED vs ROG Ally X

The Steam Deck was the original Switch competitor — it was even called the “Switch killer” by some people though that clearly didn’t work out. It did sell really well, however, which quickly led to even more options with even more power. Right now, I’d say the Steam Deck OLED and the ROG Ally X are the two most popular options. If you were to rank these machines in terms of overall power, it would look like this:

Switch 2 > Steam Deck OLED > ROG Ally X

Power isn’t everything, though. Let’s look at the details:

Battery

The easiest way to compare batteries is to look at battery capacity (Wh) and energy consumption.

The Switch has the smallest battery of the three and also consumes the least energy. It’s a significant upgrade compared to the original Switch, to be sure, but still much smaller than the competition. There are basically two options for handhelds when it comes to batteries — keep the battery small and adjust the software to work within the limitations, or make the battery big so you don’t have to adjust the software at all.

The ROG Ally X, for example, is designed to work with AAA PC titles as they are — if it works on Windows 11, it should run on the Ally X as well. But since PCs are plugged into the wall and don’t have to worry about energy, it doesn’t matter if the operating system and the games waste watts here and there (or everywhere). To compensate for these wasted watts, the Ally X needs access to as much power as possible — leading to a battery that’s four times the size of the Switch 2’s.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have Nintendo, whose developers have the advantage of being in complete control over both the software and the hardware they’re working with. They make targeted optimizations for the hardware’s unique characteristics and make sure every watt is fully utilized, allowing them to choose a much smaller battery.

As for third-party games on the Switch — they have to work within Nintendo’s limitations if they want to use the platform. Developers were able to pull off some real magic to bring their games to the original Switch — there’s a whole list of Switch games that gamers refer to as “impossible ports” because everyone assumed it would be near impossible to make them run well on the device. This trend is sure to continue with the Switch 2, especially since there’s such an increased focus on third-party games this time around.

The Steam Deck is somewhere in the middle — its handheld-specific operating system gives it a lot more control compared to the ROG Ally X running Windows 11, allowing it to do more with less power. It also has a program that encourages developers to further optimize their games for the Steam Deck so they can earn a little “Deck Verified” sticker on Steam.

In the end, just looking at the battery size can be quite misleading — it’s how you use the power you have that matters. Sure, big batteries can handle big games but it turns out, that small batteries can too.

Display

When it comes to displays, these three devices are on a much more even playing field. In fact, one could argue that the Switch 2 is the overall winner here.

Before you get disappointed about the lack of OLED for the Switch 2, it’s important to note that the battle between LCD and OLED is not always clear-cut. If you’ve ever owned or used a modern MacBook Pro, you know how good an LCD display can look. People are already trying out the Switch 2 now at Nintendo’s hands-on events and I’m hearing lots of good things about how nice the display looks.

As for all the features, it’s the only display on the list that has a 120Hz refresh rate, HDR support, and VRR support. It also has a 1080p resolution, and it’s the biggest screen size out of all the options. HDR will make the colors look amazing, 120Hz capability makes ultra-smooth gameplay possible, and the variable refresh rate will help save battery life.

We don’t know what the brightness of the Switch 2 display is, however, and screens really are best judged in person. If you happen to be making a choice between these three devices, you won’t know for sure which display you prefer until you look at them all side by side.

One thing is for sure, however — the Switch 2 is a legitimate contender here, and that’s pretty exciting.

Internals

Unfortunately, we don’t have much official information on what’s inside the Switch 2 at the moment. So far, the only thing Nintendo has said is that the device has a “custom processor made by Nvidia.”

However, details about this chip, dubbed the T239, have been floating around for a long time now, with leaks first appearing in 2021. Nothing Nintendo has shared in the past few weeks appears to invalidate these old leaks, so there’s still a good chance that it’s accurate.

The first difference here is that Nintendo is using an Nvidia chip again, whereas both the Steam Deck and the ROG Ally use AMD. While all of the numbers in the Nintendo column are still guesses, it’s probably safe to assume that no matter what the official numbers are, they will be smaller than the Steam Deck and the Ally X.

The situation here, however, is similar to the battery situation: it’s not about how much raw power you have, it’s about how you use it. The ROG Ally X runs the Windows 11 version of Cyberpunk 2077, for example, and relies on pure power to make it work. But we also know that Cyberpunk 2077 is coming to the Switch 2 — we just don’t know yet what kind of changes have been made to the game to make it run. On Steam, the base game plus the DLC require 105GB of storage — but the Switch 2 version will apparently fit on a 64GB game card.

Once upon a time, a game like this on a Nintendo console would have been all but butchered in order to make it run, with both the polygon count and the frame rate cut in half. But with the Switch 2, Nintendo has started throwing around numbers like 1440p, 4K, and 60FPS — so should we expect something magical to happen here?

How will the Nintendo Switch 2 use Nvidia AI tech?

It’s with this kind of third-party AAA title that the Tensor Cores and RT Cores hidden inside the custom Nvidia processor might come in handy. We don’t know for sure yet that Cyberpunk 2077 on the Switch 2 will use DLSS — but we do know that it can. Some people think that DLSS will be the Switch 2’s secret weapon, allowing it to output visuals and frame rates that the hardware just isn’t capable of alone.

It also has the advantage of being a TV console, meaning that people will sit much further from the screen than they would a monitor while playing on a PC. At a close distance, the imperfections DLSS produces are much more visible but the further away you sit, the better it should look.

However, DLSS is complicated tech. You can’t just “switch it on” and expect it to work with everything — it has to be trained each game first so it’s able to generate extra pixels somewhat accurately. In fact, there are currently only 700-ish games that are compatible with DLSS which is a big number in some ways but small in others. The Nintendo eShop, for example, technically has over 15,000 Switch titles available.

So while DLSS might help the Switch 2 with big-name third-party ports, potentially including all of the titles it showed off in the Direct — we definitely shouldn’t expect it to be everywhere. Not only are there a lot of games that don’t support DLSS, but I believe there are also a lot of games that simply can’t support it.

For example, Unity is an extremely popular engine when it comes to Switch games — but Unity doesn’t support DLSS by default. When you develop a Unity game, you have to choose what’s called a “Render Pipeline,” and only one of the choices (HDRP) supports fancy features like DLSS and ray tracing. However, the original Switch didn’t even support HDRP, so we know for sure that we won’t see any backward-compatible Unity titles getting scaled to 1440p or 4K with DLSS.

Since the Switch 2 can use DLSS now, it would make sense for more Switch 2 games to use it going forward — but the developers have to explicitly make that choice and put in effort to make it work, so it likely won’t happen unless it’s considered a priority.

And then there’s first-party Nintendo games — the Marios and Zeldas. I personally don’t think we’ll see a lot of DLSS here, either. Nintendo doesn’t make games with “realistic” visuals, it uses very specific art styles and my guess would be that it prefers to draw its own pixels rather than generate them. I’m not saying we won’t get a Mario title that runs at a really high resolution in docked mode — we might — but that resolution will be native, not scaled.

Anyone who likes to use DLSS on their video games already knows not to expect it everywhere, so it’s nothing new here really. Nintendo wouldn’t give the Switch 2 the ability to use it for no reason, so we can definitely look forward to finding out which titles are taking advantage of it and seeing how well it works.

Different consoles for different purposes

If you’re trying to decide how interested you are in buying a Switch 2, there are a lot of different things to consider. I won’t lie and say everyone should get one — because that’s just not true. However, you also shouldn’t write it off just because more powerful devices exist. Nintendo is a master of working within strict limits and getting the most out of its hardware, and you can trust that pretty much any Switch game Nintendo develops or spotlights will run well on the device.

The Switch 2 launch date isn’t that far away but there’s likely still a lot more information to find out between now and then. The next big stream, for instance, is the Mario Kart World Direct on April 17, and it could give us plenty more hints about what this hardware can achieve.