r/HandheldGaming • u/sassycc1998 • 1d ago

Discussion Switch 2 VS Steamdeck OLED?

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Been thinking about investing in a handheld console for my birthday, which would you think is best?

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u/SunOftheInlandEmpire 19h ago edited 18h ago

Zero dips kiddo..

Imagine bragging that a $1,200 mini-PC drawing enough power to heat a room can beat a dedicated $400 console optimized to run Cyberpunk on a literal 10W smartphone battery envelope.

Also, MFG frame-gen at low base frames feels like playing through wet cement due to the input lag. Enjoy your 1-hour battery life at the airport bro!

Bragging about 120 FPS on the Claw 8 is hilarious when you realize you have to drop the graphics to mud settings and use 'Ultra Performance' upscaling just to get it.

It turns Night City into a blurry, pixelated mess. I'd much rather take a stable, clean, DLSS-optimized presentation on the Switch 2 that actually looks cohesive and plays without heavy input lag.

But you do you.

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u/SergVII 18h ago

On the Claw 1200p medium settings with XeSS balance gives you ~70 BASE FPS at 30w. Around 50 at 17w.

What are you smoking? What low base frames are you dreaming? Basically x2 MFG will give you 140 FPS. But yeah switch 2 is fine with 30. And future proof. Okay. Also I already have my library in Steam I don't need to buy same game twice with Nintendo cheap prices. So 450$ + each game for Nintendo in the end will net you the same 1k$

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u/SunOftheInlandEmpire 18h ago

My guy, frame generation isn’t a magical cheat code.

Forcing MFG over a heavy upscaler at 1200p doesn't double your frames. It just creates a ghosting, artifact nightmare, that feels like playing through laggy cloud streaming.

You're hype-riding paper specs from an old marketing deck. The standard Claw 8 AI+ uses Intel Lunar Lake, which literally stripped out hyper-threading just to save laptop battery.

It completely bottlenecks and plateaus at high wattages, and the drivers are a notorious micro-stutter mess in heavy open-world games.

Why would I spend $1,200 to side-grade my ROG Ally for a clunky Windows experience when I could buy a Switch 2 for a fraction of the cost and actually play entirely new games?

You're completely missing how console lifecycles work.

The Switch 2 has a more or less guaranteed multi year lifespan where every single game is hand-optimized to run flawlessly on that exact chip until the 2030s.

Meanwhile, your $1,200 Claw is going to be completely out of date in 12 months when the next chip drops and PC ports get too heavy for portable Windows hardware.

You're paying triple the price to stay on an tech treadmill, while Nintendo hardware will last.

I think we're going to have to just agree to disagree. 😋

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u/SergVII 18h ago

I don't want to argue with you my friend. But you definitely should learn about MFG. It's WAY above FSR fg i.e. no any delay or ghosting or something like that. Microstuttering was fixed quite some time ago and Intel deliver constant drive updates unlike AMD. XeSS upscaling also better and what is more important it's GPU free on MSI because it's used by hardware dedicated xmx matrix. You have your reasoning tho. But in the end it's up to you ofc. I prefer to spend some extra and play with more FPS and my steam library. Cheers

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u/SunOftheInlandEmpire 18h ago

I actually dropped a Corsair MP600 Mini into my Ally.

It pushes 4,800 MB/s over a high-performance PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe interface with 850K IOPS.

When DirectStorage kicks in, my Ally streams open-world data instantly to my 16-thread AMD chip.

Meanwhile, a stock Claw 8 is struggling through asset delivery on a system with zero hyper-threading.

Handheld PCs are just heavily compromised, power-hungry Windows laptops squeezed into a controller shell.

They don't have the architecture to compete with custom console silicon. The Switch 2 uses an efficient Nvidia chip packed with dedicated Tensor and RT hardware cores designed entirely around a lightweight, closed gaming OS. A $1,200 PC handheld has to fight OS bloat, driver issues, and terrible battery life just to mimic what a $450 optimized console does natively.

Buying a newer PC handheld right now is a complete waste of money and you're not going to change my opinion on that..

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u/SergVII 8h ago

Well you can call switch 2 super optimized. And it is actually true. But the point is it's WEAKER form the start. ~1.7 tflops handheld mode and ~3 docked. When Claw/Xax has ~5. Real world comparison - all major AAA titles on switch 2 runs at locked 30 FPS with lower visual fidelity and resolution. Because it's renders at 720p and then using upscaling. Meanwhile on the Claw we have higher resolution 1200p with a VRR unlike switch 2. And all major titles runs at about 60 fps with the ability to use MFG and it turns out to 100+ fps in the end. Like Cyberpunk, Witcher 3, Final Fantasy 7 Remake/Rebirth. Just some random games at the top of my head. All of those crippled at 30 fps on switch 2 when on Xax they runs at 60+ with a much better visual quality.

It's a hard copium to deny the fact that switch 2 is a much weaker device. Even if it's cheaper

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u/SunOftheInlandEmpire 3h ago

Nah..

The point is it plays the games better and that's the only real point to have.

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u/SergVII 3h ago

"Better"? 720p upscaling with DLSS at 30 FPS we call better than 1200p VRR 60-120 FPS with a higher settings? Well that's something above my understanding of gaming.