What “standards” are you comparing it to? The Switch 1 was behind home consoles, but that’s not really a fair comparison. There was nothing similar on the market to appropriately compare it to, no “standard”.
Five years later the Steam Deck outperformed the Switch, because of course hardware from five years later would. But the gap between the 2017 Switch and 2022 Deck is not so vast that you can definitively claim in advance to know that the 2025 Switch 2 definitely has to be worse. You don’t know that and can’t go claiming it as fact.
All we know so far is that the Switch 2 does beat the Deck in at least one major attribute: it has a 1080p120 screen, in contrast to the Deck’s 800p60. And it is not unlikely to expect the rest of the hardware to reflect that.
OP claimed the Steam Deck’s CPU was definitely worse than the Switch 2 (this was an explicit, categorical statement).
Considering the Switch’s history (Cortex A57 used in the OG Switch being three generation behind in 2017), it’s not unreasonable to speculate that the Switch 2 CPU is likely to be extremely weak from a gaming perspective (I never brought up compute or synthetic benchmarks).
Exactly what hardware at a similarly competitive price point and form factor are you comparing it to when you say it’s behind?
The Switch 1 didn’t use the very best top of the line parts that money could buy, but if that’s what you’re fixating on then you’re missing the fact that neither did the Steam Deck. The Switch made compromises to hit a $300 price point in 2017, and the Deck made compromises to hit a $400 price point in 2022.
Portable devices using ARM CPU cores, even ones for ~$350, like the Xiaomi F1 released in 2018. It came with a new Snapdragon 845 SoC that included an Adreno 630 GPU.
It didn’t have the form factor of the Switch, I will give you that. My point is that the Switch had a very weak CPU when compared to similar devices even in the same price band for its time.
So it’s not a similar device. Comparing to phones is rather misleading, given that phones do not have active cooling and wouldn’t actually be able to run the kinds of games the Switch hardware could without catching on fire in the process. They aren’t gaming hardware.
It’s a portable gaming device. It is in the same market.
You can play complex strategy games that require strong CPUs like Project Highrise, The Final Earth 2, Mega Mall Story 2 on mobile.
You won’t be able to run The Final Earth 2 even with the standard mobile population limit on a Switch because it uses an ancient CPU and it’s a quad core.
Don’t limit yourself by Nintendo PR and marketing. The gaming world (portable or otherwise) is not limited to Nintendo.
What “standards” are you comparing it to? The Switch 1 was behind home consoles, but that’s not really a fair comparison. There was nothing similar on the market to appropriately compare it to, no “standard”.
Five years later the Steam Deck outperformed the Switch, because of course hardware from five years later would. But the gap between the 2017 Switch and 2022 Deck is not so vast that you can definitively claim in advance to know that the 2025 Switch 2 definitely has to be worse. You don’t know that and can’t go claiming it as fact.
All we know so far is that the Switch 2 does beat the Deck in at least one major attribute: it has a 1080p120 screen, in contrast to the Deck’s 800p60. And it is not unlikely to expect the rest of the hardware to reflect that.
OP claimed the Steam Deck’s CPU was definitely worse than the Switch 2 (this was an explicit, categorical statement).
Considering the Switch’s history (Cortex A57 used in the OG Switch being three generation behind in 2017), it’s not unreasonable to speculate that the Switch 2 CPU is likely to be extremely weak from a gaming perspective (I never brought up compute or synthetic benchmarks).
Exactly what hardware at a similarly competitive price point and form factor are you comparing it to when you say it’s behind?
The Switch 1 didn’t use the very best top of the line parts that money could buy, but if that’s what you’re fixating on then you’re missing the fact that neither did the Steam Deck. The Switch made compromises to hit a $300 price point in 2017, and the Deck made compromises to hit a $400 price point in 2022.
Portable devices using ARM CPU cores, even ones for ~$350, like the Xiaomi F1 released in 2018. It came with a new Snapdragon 845 SoC that included an Adreno 630 GPU.
It didn’t have the form factor of the Switch, I will give you that. My point is that the Switch had a very weak CPU when compared to similar devices even in the same price band for its time.
So it’s not a similar device. Comparing to phones is rather misleading, given that phones do not have active cooling and wouldn’t actually be able to run the kinds of games the Switch hardware could without catching on fire in the process. They aren’t gaming hardware.
It’s a portable gaming device. It is in the same market.
You can play complex strategy games that require strong CPUs like Project Highrise, The Final Earth 2, Mega Mall Story 2 on mobile.
You won’t be able to run The Final Earth 2 even with the standard mobile population limit on a Switch because it uses an ancient CPU and it’s a quad core.
Don’t limit yourself by Nintendo PR and marketing. The gaming world (portable or otherwise) is not limited to Nintendo.