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Comment by tiahura | Hacker News Reader

As my 6 year old makes his way through Fortnite Season 5, I'm impressed that his Switch still handles his no-scope sniper odyssey on these 8 year old Tegra X1s.

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I've been playing Skyrim and Portal 2 on the Switch Lite and it keeps amazing me that games that my PS3 struggled with are now perfectly playable on a handheld device that has pretty good battery life and doesn't burn my hand. A device like this would have blown my mind 10 or 15 years ago (even more than the original PSP did the first time I saw one).

The PSP was amazing. The PS Vita - on a whole 'nother level, both performance-wise and controller improvement. It wasn't until the Switch came around in 2017 (purchased in 2018) that we realized HD (720p) gaming on a handheld machine. The fact that so many AAA games have been ported down to it is a testimony to its capabilities. Not a fan of nVIDIA in general, but they did an amazing job with this unit. If one wants real PC gameplay without porting down, the Steam Deck starts at $400, add a MicroSD card for more storage.

What really blows me away is stuff like the z1 extreme and a laptop I have that is two generations behind that but has a 130w power envelope pushing 60-100fps AAA titles at 1440p - runs super hot but in a few years we may have handhelds doing something similar which I'm super excited for.

There is nothing that can be encompassed by a 220-300+ power envelope into a handheld for the next several years. Still, downgrading visual FX is one doable. Steam Deck 2 and Switch 2 are in the horizon. AMD v. Intel, as far as I'm concerned.

Wait till you see what Apple's Vision group has in store.

The vita sucked with no homebrew and the switch is another psp. You could run games off the pro duo or a microsd adapter but vita was locked down, slow and a bunch of lame remakes and psp titles. The PSP emulated up to the PS1.

By the time the switch was around people had been emulating on Android for a long time. They can do better graphics but there hasn’t been a game that made me feel like I needed 4K on handheld. The switch really is another golden age for gaming with the switch being hacked so quickly and having such good homebrew.

The PS Vita predated the Switch by 6+ years... by the time emulation and CPU speed to match its requirements, it was already discontinued by Sony. It fulfilled its purpose.

The vita was a direct downgrade from a PSP if you valued fast loading times, emulation, homebrew and piracy. Even if you didn't pirate you gained the ability to rebuy your PSP games, and new expensive games with an OLED that had less battery life.

A downgrade from UMDs? Perhaps you're referring to the density of textures and newer, more demanding game engines, because the UMDs were such a pain. Trying hard not to get hyperbolic here.

Never touched a UMD. With the microsd loading or memory like PSP go it was instantaneous especially at 333mhz.

At least regarding the homebrew, I disagree completely. While it took a while for the vita to be thoroughly hacked, it has been thoroughly hacked. And the benefits are numerous: Using normal SD cards, expanding the the integrated psp hardware into a virtual psp, reformatting of the internal storage, extending it by replacing the 3G modem.

Meanwhile the switch had the big bootrom usb stack exploit, but everything apart from the original SoC doesn't have a publicly known easy exploit (there are mod chips, but nothing like the 3DS/PS3/Wii U/Vita/PSP/...). There also wasn't that as much "cool" stuff to do as on older consoles with homebrew due to the hardware simply being an android tablet with controllers (which doesn't make a difference as a console, but makes it more boring homebrew wise). So there is the usual stuff (savegames, different controllers, piracy, themes, overclocking), but nothing unique to the switch.

By the time it was thoroughly hacked, it was too late. Much better hardware was around. People could do most of what the vita was eventually able to do with a phone.

Besides piracy what do you expect from the switch? The PSP had an ebook reader, movie player and could play mp3s as well as other cool old games very early in it's release. It could play media and play games up to the ps1. Modding a PSP vita today is like maxing out a citron 2cv instead of buying an e scooter. When the PSP came out it was amazing. Now it's yesterday's news. I'm impressed by the hackers that did it but the vita just doesn't impress even with hombrew today for the capabilities.

The PSP had amazing battery life and felt like a better Gameboy advance at the time.

I wish the person I sold my fully-loaded 1/2 TB MicroSD Vita to a grand adventure with a pocketable gaming/homebrew/emulation/piracy machine. Nothing matches it in tis market given its capibilities. The Switch lite tried, but I ain't touching that crap without HDMI output and no mods available.

Yeah, hacking portable console was interesting and useful on PSP/DS era even for a script kiddy users, because there are not much affordable portable devices. Now we have a smartphone, so it's for who enjoy hacking and run emulator and/or pirated games.

What really killed the scene for video games was better devices. I got a PS4 that was hacked and there's not much homebrew on it. I would update it to play online since I don't do cool stuff with it but I don't even play it enough to justify that. Now you can get a cheaper better htpc and use that instead of something like xbmc on Xbox.

The Vita had a ton of amazing JRPGs, niche weeb stuff, visual novels and indie games. Bit of a weird lineup but for many years it was my most used system. These days the Vita has been cracked wide open and there's loads of homebrew.

Right now it's only the early Switch units that are hackable.

Did you have a PSP? The vita was such a downgrade from it and the vita like the PSP mostly had remakes, except the vita had psp remakes too. It had no killer game or multimedia capabilities by the time it released. I can't name an exclusive on there at all, I don't even know if it had one.

Yes lol. I had a PSP shortly after launch. I still have one. And yes, the Vita had games and exclusives. Most of its launch lineup was exclusives, Uncharted Golden Abyss, Wipeout 2048, Hot Shots Golf World Invitational, etc. Even for just playing PSP games, the Vita is better. OLED display+ the ability to remap the right stick to the D-pad or buttons. Makes games like MH: Freedom Unite waaay better.

And a lot of indie games, JRPGs, Visual Novels just fit the handheld form factor better than PC or PS4 even if they weren't exclusive.

Those games ported to the switch are severely downgraded graphically compared to their other consoles counter parts.

My laptop runs Kbby Lake and Intel HD 620 and can't match the Switch's 30 fps perf. It's incredible what it can do. The 3070 that runs 220+W on my desktop is hard to replace ore minituarize.

Ehh one is a gaming machine the other a general purpose machine with a really weak GPU.

There is a lot of space between a 3070 and a Switch. e.g. a few (I'd guess ~5) year old iPhones/iPads are considerably more powerful than the Switch. Unfortunately, it's just not a great platform for gaming.

Also keep in mind that iPhones and iPads were a lot more expensive than the Switch.

(Of course, Nintendo still sells (nearly) the same switch for nearly the same price, but a five your old mobile device would go for a lot less nowadays.)

The cheapeast iPad is ~$330 which is about the same as the Switch.

Also the Steam Deck starts at $399.

I'm sure they are, but it's much less noticeable than the handheld ports of things used to be. Having played many hours of Star Wars Battlefront II on PS2 and original Xbox, the PSP versions of Battlefront (II, Renegade Squadron, Elite Squadron) had some obvious compromises but were at least very similar to play. Then I tried the DS version of Renegade Squadron and the gameplay was almost unrecognizable from the others, which still disappoints me to this day.

Granted, I'm playing Skyrim and Portal 2 on Switch Lite so I can't see them on the TV and compare them at the same size as the PS3 versions of those games, but Skyrim at least seems to suffer much less lag and visual glitching than the PS3 version. I don't have any newer console to compare with so I'm happy!

Frankly, we still have nothing providing HD gaming on a handheld. The switch is way too big to be considered a handheld. I can't slip one into my pocket and go, like I could with a DS or 3DS. It's frustrating, because I love my 3DS for gaming on the go but there is still nothing which can replace it. Nintendo just gave up on the handheld market.

A Switch Micro would be pretty cool.

I was just thinking that I’d love it if Nintendo made a Micro console again. I don’t feel like the Switch Lite was actually small enough to justify as a companion to the full-sized Switch. More just an alternative for those who don’t care about docked play.

But a pocketable Micro console would be awesome for those times I don’t want to have a full backpack with me, which the regular Switch requires.

The GBA micro was about as small as a usable console could get. The older I get, the less accepting of these limitations I've become. The Vita and PSP was a good median in twrms of practically.

HD at 720p is more than enough for a 6" screen. The Switch is literally the only capable handheld that could do that and still does. It doesn't offer excellence, but it offers good enough. As already written, the Steam Deck replaced it a half a decade later. Not sure what your point is. Everything grows generatially in capability and capacity, including handhelds. I would not compare the Gameboy to the Gameboy Advance under such limitations.

> The switch is way too big to be considered a handheld.

This seems like a pretty subjective judgment. Was the Sega Game Gear not a handheld console?

Not to mention the Atari Lynx, which was wider than the Switch (and about 3x as thick).

The lifetime sales of the Vita and 3DS combined don't even beat out the sales of the Nintendo DS. The dedicated handheld market was killed by the same killer of portable media players and point-and-shoot cameras: the smartphone. Like the other markets, not by the smartphone being better, but by being good enough and always in your pocket.

Imo for your case, maybe try gaming on the phone with a grip adaptor? Should be both powerful &pocketable

I have some great memories working on the PSP. While you could get some FP precision issues if you weren't careful, I really liked being having BVH testing as part of the command buffer.

The true testament to what can be handled on a mobile device these days is showcased on iOS devices. The iPhone 15 Pros can run a port of Resident Evil 7 at supposedly a pretty stable 30fps.

Unfortunately all of Apple's chips are stuck in Apple devices, where they're still struggling to incentivize developers to do ports as standard. So they're pumping out beautiful graphics to beautiful displays for games with shitty touch screen controls that are riddled with ads and/or are just glorified virtual casinos.

Sure but the iPhone 15 Pro costs 3x as much and came out years later.

Yes but the comment I replied to where they were saying how impressive it was to run Skyrim on Switch was written in 2023

It's impressive, but it's also somewhat amazing to consider that the Tegra X1 is still about 3.5-4x as powerful as the GPU in the Raspberry Pi 5 - even if any iPhone chip since the A11 Bionic would beat the X1.

We’ll never see it, but I’ve wondered what a Switch would look like with an Apple chip.

Take something relatively modern but no longer too expensive, say an A15 like the Apple TV has, bump the screen to 1080p, and I bet it would scream. Possibly with better battery life.

Nintendo would never do that. I doubt Apple would either. But it would be a very interesting test.

Other AAA games like Tears of the Kingdom also having stunning graphics. It’s quite impressive, though only rendered in 720p.

Isn’t it 1080p when docked?

It's a dynamic resolution in both docked and undocked modes since it appears to be mainly memory bandwidth limited. It does max out at 900p when docked though.

Thanks. I couldn’t remember if they did that or not.

It's pretty, but the framerate is sometimes barely playable.

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