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Early on in the Switch’s lifespan, I wrote a little blog on my now dusty and largely abandoned personal web site about how its power level impressed me. I wasn’t expecting much from the Nvidia-produced mobile hardware inside the machine, but I found the performance level shocking at the time. It turned out that the Switch was capable of delivering modern effects and rendering perks — at lower resolutions and framerates than other machines yes, but leagues beyond what I had grown comfortable with in the portable space up to that point.
Docking the machine for a boost in power was really cool too, with the Switch producing totally fine-looking results even on a television.
Now, it’s nearly eight long years later. The modest Switch hardware is starting to look comically old. Switch versions of games have almost no market expectations for good graphical performance, with even first party Nintendo efforts often suffering from obvious visual issues and framerate hitching. The hardware has had its fair share of so-called “miracle ports,” sure — but it’s a super easy bet that if a game has a Switch version, it’s going to be the most technologically compromised.
