This includes an arsenal of Nintendo first-party exclusives, including Mario Odyssey, Metroid Dread, and the highly acclaimed The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The Switch plays games that were created specifically for Nintendo’s system (and some older ones that have been optimized).
By contrast, the OLED Switch sports a 1280×720 (720p) self-emissive panel that allows pixels to turn off completely for a more striking result. Valve opted for a 1280×800 LCD, which uses LED backlighting, which can result in washed-out blacks and a less-than-stellar contrast ratio. One area where Nintendo may have the advantage however is in the display on the Switch OLED model. Though there’s a lot more to analyzing the performance of both machines than a simplistic “bigger number = better performance” read, the difference between the two machines represents a generational leap in terms of handheld performance. You wouldn’t be wrong on any level if you said that the Steam Deck is five years ahead of the Switch in terms of hardware. The Steam Deck enjoys higher clock speeds, newer CPU and GPU architectures, a larger pool of RAM, and faster storage options than the Switch. The mid and upper tiers use faster NVMe-based SSDs for improved read and write times. The base Steam Deck uses similar eMMC flash memory as the Switch but employs the faster PCI Express 2.0 x1 standard (up to 500MB/sec). Valve has compared the GPU capabilities of the Steam Deck to that of the Radeon RX 6000 series, running between 1 and 1.6 GHz.
The CPU runs between 2.4 and 3.5 GHz, and the system has access to 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM. It’s powered by a custom AMD accelerated processing unit (APU) that’s based on Zen 2 (CPU) and RDNA 2 (GPU) architectures, the same technology that helped build the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5.
In contrast, the Steam Deck saw release in early 2022, a full five years later than the Switch.