Comment on Elden Ring on Switch 2 Is a Disaster in Handheld Mode - IGN

• carotte@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  well optimized for the steam deck (or for PCs, really)

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  • kautau@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Yeah it’s just generally still way higher powered than the switch 2. But Nintendo has always sold underpowered hardware because of their monopoly on their properties

    www.pcgamer.com/…/switch-2-versus-steam-deck/

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    • Stovetop@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      The Switch 2 is actually decently beefy for what it is—give or take certain specs, it’s about comparable to the PS4, which Elden Ring launched on and ran fine on. But Elden Ring is simply a poorly optimized game overall. It ran like shit on PC after it launched, they eventually got it into a mostly good state years later (or maybe people just upgraded hardware to the point they could brute force it to be stable).

      But I guess trying to port it from x86 to Tegra for Switch 2 is another thing entirely that they apparently weren’t prepared for. If all they did was shove it behind an emulation layer or something (yikes if so), I can see why it’d suck. But given just how held together by duct tape the game is in general, I wouldn’t be surprised if they simply lack the resources or expertise to really optimize for a different architecture.

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      • thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I wouldn’t hold my breath, but at least a port to ARM would also give Mac users access to Elden Ring - and God knows macOS is in dire need of more natively compiled games in order to be taken as even a semi-viable platform.

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  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    … 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.

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    • carotte@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      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

      technically capable of running software… but just barely.

      come on now.

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      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        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.

        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.

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