Great in theory, but only really works for first party games and does mean you occasionally end up with unfortunate situations like Tears of the Kingdom where it runs better on an emulator than the actual hardware.
Ooh, thank you for the reminder to see where the state of emulation is. I played Breath of the Wild on both Switch and on PC under emulation, and the difference was night and day. The stuttering on the Switch distracted quite a bit. My PC played in beautiful 4k.
It works for everyone, provided they have the skills.
I have stop buying most AAA games, because they are GB of useless gameplay, or remakes from remakes of remasters, that is better invested into sponsoring indies.
Tears of the Kingdom is far from the only Switch game with performance issues. Off the top of my head, the newest Pokemon games (and the next newest, to a lesser extent) run like shit on the Switch. I've heard complaints about other games too.
It was underpowered when it was released in 2016, so it really shouldn't be that surprising.
And if we are going to start counting frame drops as argument against focusing on gameplay instead of triangles per second, there is no safe platform then.
I don't think the number of games in the catalogue matters in this discussion? There are hundreds of Switch games that perform great, and I don't care because I will never play them.
When I play a game and there are frame drops, stuttering, lag, dropped inputs, etc., it reduces my fun just as much as if the game were poorly designed. Maybe that's not the case for you, maybe you don't care, but I do, so do others.
I don't think Nintendo should make a console that rivals the best machine money can buy. I do think they took too long to refresh the hardware in the Switch lineup and their customers are worse off for it.
I don't have this issue on other computing devices. My PC runs all the games I want to play on it very well. I can also upgrade the hardware whenever I want, unlike in my Switch.
> Having been through the demoscene and home computing days since their birth, I can only laugh when calling Switch underpowered.
What does this have to do with the fact that the Switch has performance issues with first party Nintendo games? Hardware power only makes sense when talking about the software you want to run on it. The Switch is underpowered for software released exclusively for it, by the company that makes it. It's not underpowered for NES games, sure, but neither is an NES.
It's not "safe from any frame drops" vs. "has frame drops." How often they drop to what framerate for how long is what makes up the experience. (Similarly, I don't need games on my Switch to look as high-fidelity as my 4090 renders them on my PC, but more textures/reflections would still be welcome over less.)
That's why I agree with what some others in the thread have said-- we'll need to wait for either numbers or, absolutely, some real-world experience to know how big of an improvement we can actually expect to get from an upgrade.
