Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

At the time of its release the Nintendo Switch’s CPU was only a single generation behind the latest offering by ARM; and its GPU was by far the most powerful mobile GPU available. It doesn’t hold true for Switch.

What happened is that mobile compute has advanced tremendously since 2017 and Switch is stuck on technology that was leading in early 2017.

It's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison though, even if all 3 devices are technically consoles. The Switch is basically a tablet with controllers attached and a tablet/phone CPU while PS5/Xbox are just custom build PCs.

Being so dismissive of the Switch shows the disconnect between what most gamers care about, and what some tech enthusiasts think gamers care about.

The Switch 1 used a crappy mobile chip, sure, but it was able to run tons of games that no other Tegra device could have dreamed of running, due to the power of having a stable target for optimization, with sufficiently powerful APIs available, and a huge target market. The Switch 1 can do 90% of what a Steam Deck can, while using a fraction of the power, thickness, and cooling. With the Switch 2 almost certainly gaining DLSS, I fully expect the Switch 2 to run circles around the Steam Deck, even without a “high end chip”. It will be weaker on paper, but that won’t matter.

I say this as someone who owns a PS5, a Switch OLED, an ROG Ally, and a fairly decent gaming PC. I briefly had an original Steam Deck, but the screen was atrocious.

Most people I see talking about Steam Deck’s awesomeness seem to either have very little experience with a Switch, or just have a lot of disdain for Nintendo. Yes, having access to Steam games is cool… but hauling around a massive device with short battery life is not cool to most gamers, and neither is spending forever tweaking settings just to get something that’s marginally better than the Switch 1 can do out of the box.

The Switch 1 is at the end of its life right now, but Nintendo is certainly preparing the hardware for the next 6 to 8 years.

That was true back in the Wii era, because there was nothing remarkable about the Wii apart from its input method. It was "just another home console" to most developers, so why bother going through the effort to port their games from more powerful consoles down to the Wii, where they will just look bad, run poorly, and have weird controls?

With the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo found huge success in third party titles because everyone who made a game was enthusiastic about being able to play their game portably, and the Switch made that possible with hardware that was architecturally similar to other consoles and PCs (at least by comparison to previous handheld gaming consoles), which made porting feasible without a complete rewrite.

In my opinion, basically the only console games that aren't available on Switch at this point are the very most recent crop of high-end games, which the Switch is too old to run, as well as certain exclusives. If the Switch were still able to handle all the third party ports, then I don't even know if Nintendo would be interested in a Switch 2, but they do seem to care about the decent chunk of money they're making from third party games.

The overlap with PC is the same as the overlap between PC and other consoles... which is quite a lot, but doesn't include certain genres like RTSes. They've tried bringing Starcraft to console before, and that wasn't very well received for obvious reasons, haha

> It's not obvious that they were the first time and still did fine, why would they change their approach this time

I'm not sure I was saying they would change their approach... the Switch 1 is over 7 years old at this point. I was just saying they're preparing the next generation to last the same amount of time, which means finding sufficiently powerful hardware. The Switch 1 was sufficiently powerful, even for running lots of "impossible" ports throughout its lifetime: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENECyFQPe-4

All of that to say, I am a big fan of the Switch OLED. I'm honestly ready to sell my ROG Ally, just because I never use it. But, being a bit of a contradiction, I am also extremely interested in the PS5 Pro. My PS5 has been a great experience, but I wish it had graphical fidelity that was a bit closer to my PC... without the inconvenience of Windows. For a handheld, I care a lot about portability (small size), battery life, and low hassle (not Windows, and not requiring tons of tweaking of graphics settings to get a good experience), and the Switch OLED does a great job of those things, while having access to a surprisingly complete catalog of both first-party and third-party games.

Hard to say. It tooks Qualcomm years make something that was superior to standard ARM designs. GPU is of course another matter.

> I'm certain Nvidia would have no trouble doing a high end console,

The last mobile/consumer CPU (based on their own core) that they have released came out in 2015 and they have been using off the shelf ARM core designs for their embedded and server stuff. Wouldn't they be effectively be starting from scratch?

I'm sure they could achieve that in a few years but do you think it would take them significantly less time that it did Apple or Qualcomm?

> Nvidia is incapable of building something higher end

I think it depends more on what Nintendo is willing to pay, I doubt they really want a "high-end" chip.