BareKnuckleRoo wrote: ↑Fri Apr 04, 2025 2:14 pm
Steven wrote: ↑Fri Apr 04, 2025 11:57 amHopefully this thing has a forced 60Hz mode so you can control battery life. Depending on the game, there's a big difference in battery life on Steam Deck between 90 and 60 and the same will be true here, assuming it exists.
I find it odd that Nintendo would roll out a 120 FPS feature as a selling point when its previous model couldn't even manage 60 FPS for all games. I still wish we could get to a point where 60 FPS without framedrops is the gold standard to aim for rather than having tons of 3D 30 FPS games. I'm highly skeptical as to how well it'll support 120 FPS, let alone without framerate drops, especially without cramming so much expensive cutting-edge tech that the console becomes ridiculous in price.
I was thinking the same things, but the devs are still responsible for their games' performance within the target hardware's limits, so they can always lower resolution, texture quality, AA, shadow quality, etc. if needed. Lower those too much and some people will damn the game for "having PS2 graphics" or whatever, but if the devs don't lower them enough other people will call out the game(s) for running terribly and saying the devs should have turned the graphics down to get better performance, so it's going to be difficult to find a balance.
Ultimately, the people who actually know what a framerate even is are probably the minority and the devs and especially publishers want to sell as much as possible, so sadly and logically it does make sense to push visuals over performance so that everyone who is convinced solely by shininess buys. I imagine Nintendo will probably be the main source of 120 FPS games, but we'll see.
I wonder what the battery life on this thing is going to be; that's a major concern with the original 3DS (most 3DS models, actually), the original Switch, and all handheld PCs, so it will be interesting. Apparently some of the non-Steam Deck handheld PCs have absolutely terrible battery life comparable to the Game Gear or Nomad (!!!) if you don't turn the graphics down, which is one of the big reasons that the Steam Deck is still the best handheld gaming PC. Even the Steam Deck, which has the best battery life of them all as of the last time I checked, gives wildly inconsistent battery life depending on what you play and what you set the screen refresh rate, game FPS, and graphics to. Some stuff gives me huge battery life, like Sonic Mania (which also gives huge battery life on Switch, supposedly because it barely uses the GPU at all and relies on the CPU to do almost everything), and some stuff will drain the battery in about 1.5~2.5 hours, like Jurassic World Evolution 2 on the special Steam Deck graphics preset configuration thingy at 90Hz at 45 FPS. I could turn the graphics down for that game, but I typically leave it at 45 FPS and reduce the screen's refresh rate to 45Hz, as even that can have a pretty big effect depending on the game, and for JWE2 it does help.
The Steam Deck is prohibitively massive and awkward to drag around outside my house, though, so I don't bring it outside very often and typically just run it at whatever highest settings I can while laying in bed and being lazy. At the same time, it's actually very slightly smaller than the Switch with those big Hori Joy-con things, but probably twice the weight. Fortunately, it's far more comfortable than the Switch ever was. Hopefully they fix that on Switch 2 as well; I've mentioned before that holding the stock Switch with its Joy-cons attached is like holding onto a live fish of about the same thickness as the Joy-cons: it always felt like it was going to slip out of my grasp or something before I put the Hori monstrosities on it, and those are honestly not that much better.
'tude
However the free-roam mode seems to be disjunct from the versus and Grand Prix modes, so not all is lost. At least I feel like separating the open world from the actual game is the way to go. You can explore the world once, be done with it and play the actual game whenever you feel like it. ... if only they didn't make the open world sections part of the Grand Prix races. Apparently the first couple laps of every race is now just following a straight line to get to the actual course, which is only raced once in the final lap. Who knows why they thought that would make for a fun racing game. 
