TL;DW: Journalists played Elden Ring on Switch 2 on gamescom. They weren’t allowed to record gameplay but performance is really bad. Tons of stuttering and reportedly dips to <20FPS in cases.
TL;DW: Journalists played Elden Ring on Switch 2 on gamescom. They weren’t allowed to record gameplay but performance is really bad. Tons of stuttering and reportedly dips to <20FPS in cases.
… The Switch is built out of roughly the same kind of computer components as a PC, as a Deck, as a laptop.
PCs tend to have a distinct CPU and GPU, more modern Consoles and the Deck and Switch tend to use basically an APU, where the CPU and GPU are the same physical thing, and they use a different kind of RAM than a PC, such that it can be shared by the CPU and GPU functions of the APU…
(PC or dedicated GPUs have their own, different kind of RAM)
…but its not like the Switch 2 is some magical kind of completely incomparable thing.
Like … AMD and Nvidia make GPUs for PCs.
The Switch 2 uses an Nvidia APU.
The Deck uses an AMD APU.
They… both use x86_64 architecture. They both use the same general category of LPDDR RAM.
Basically, what you are saying is, is that Elden Ring is poorly optimized for cheap, Nvidia APUs, which Nintendo contracted Nvidia to develop for them, to put into their Switch 2s.
Its… not like Nvidia drivers for Elden Ring have… not been a thing, for years.
People have been playing Elden Ring on all kinds of other devices for years as well.
To use PC terminology, the Switch 2 is what you’d call a potato: technically capable of running software… but just barely.
the switch 2 is ARM based, not x86. idk the intricacies of the switch 2 GPU when compared to mainstream nvidia graphics cards, but I’d guess there are major differences between a mobile APU and a big boy PC GPU
come on now.
Oh well ok you got me, Switch 2 is ARM based, I am wrong there.
As to differences between APU and GPU drivers?
Nah, not really, at least not on linux, from a game-user standpoint, not these days.
That the Switch 2 is ARM based is probably actually significant.
You would basically have to port an 86_64 game over to ARM, potentially redesign a whole bunch of the game’s core inner working systems.
Again though, yes, there are big differences between a full PC GPU and an APU… but there’s far less difference between a laptop GPU and APU, in terms of compute power per physical volume, and many laptops can run Elden Ring just fine.
The Deck and Switch 2 both have APUs… only one of them really struggles with Elden Ring.
And yes, the Switch is a potato compared to even a low-mid tier gaming PC.
It is also a potato compared to a Deck:
I have yet to encounter a Switch 1 game I cannot emulate on my Deck, with worse than a 10% FPS drop from what the Switch itself gets natively on that same game.
Used to be the case that you need a pretty beefy desktop PC or laptop to emulate last gen consoles.
Uh nope, not anymore.
EDIT:
If the Switch 2 is using an ARM chip, probably the closer comparison would then be to a smartphone, as ARM has been dominant in smartphones for some time, due to it basically mazimizing energy efficiency and low cost, at the comparative detriment of overall compute power, when you put it up against x86_64 broadly.