Digital Foundry’s John Linneman has stirred the pot when it comes to discussions about the Switch 2’s potential power.
Linneman was responding to The Verge editor Tom Warren, who shared his opinion on the matter on Twitter:
“there are so many rumors floating around about the Switch 2, but the funniest one is about it being as powerful as a PS4 Pro”
Linneman somewhat unexpectedly responded with this:
“That is funny because it’s likely to be quite superior in many ways due to using modern Nvidia architecture with access to features the PS4 Pro does not. As a portable device, though, it’ll be limited in other, different areas.”
Digital Foundry had previously made a video where they made their best speculation on the console’s potential power. By finding the closest match to the Switch 2’s rumored specs in a laptop and running several tests on it, they found that the Switch 2 could run 8th generation and 9th generation games comfortably at 1080p via DLSS. In fact, they managed to get Death Stranding running in the Switch 2 analog at 1440p, with a stable 30 FPS.
DLSS is the most high-profile but certainly not the only technology Nvidia is giving Nintendo to weaponize on the Switch 2. Few people remember this, but Nvidia managed to get their Tegra running console games on a mobile chip a decade before AMD were able to unveil their own incarnation in the Z1 Extreme.
But of course, we have also already seen that the original Switch trounce expectations with its neat little library of impossible ports, of games like No Man’s Sky, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, and Doom Eternal. We also know the merits of Nvidia’s technology versus AMD’s, and where each company has advantages over the other.
But it seems the real issue here is that many fans, even gaming press, don’t accurately remember the PlayStation 4 Pro’s power in their memories. It was certainly the more successful in the market compared to the Xbox One X, but Digital Foundry themselves found the more popular choice lacking when it came to performance.
And this shouldn’t really be up for debate, because while Sony chose to retain the CPU and upgrade the GPU for the PlayStation 4 Pro’s upgrade, Microsoft chose to answer all doubters and provide a genuine generational upgrade, with a significantly performant CPU for the Xbox One X compared to its predecessor.
But even in its own terms, the PlayStation 4 Pro didn’t quite deliver as many 4K game experiences as Sony seemed to have promised its fans. It’s perfectly fine to admit that Sony delivered more software than hardware in that prior generation, since it certainly has nothing to be ashamed of in that count.
Ultimately, the Switch 2 is guaranteed a minimum degree of success as well, because Nintendo’s brand is full of huge first-party franchises of their own. Some fans and game press do also believe that the power equation somewhat doesn’t matter for Nintendo because of this.
But we think there is reason to be excited about the true unlocking of the potential of this collaboration between Nintendo and Nvidia. After a successful first round, the two tech companies now know what to expect from each other, and they can work together to make a new platform that can confound gamer expectations even more.
