Nintendo Switch 2 vs Steam Deck GPU battle - which handheld has better graphics?

While the Switch 2 vs Steam Deck meme war plays out on social media, I'm in the enviable position of owning both handhelds at the moment, and I love them both for different reasons. There's a lot of talk about GPU power, though, and not much in the way to back it up. After all, you can't easily benchmark the Switch 2. You can, however, take a good look at the two devices' GPUs and make a decent prediction, which is what I'm doing here.

I'm not going to tell you which is the best gaming handheld of the two, as that's largely down to the games you want to play and the user experience you prefer, but I can pull apart the inner workings of the AMD GPU inside the Steam Deck GPU, as well as the new Nvidia GPU inside the Switch 2, and give you an idea of how they perform.

Let's start with the handheld everyone's discussing right now, which is the Switch 2. Neither Nintendo nor Nvidia has officially revealed the core specs of this GPU, but Digital Foundry's recent excellent analysis has, for all intents and purposes, confirmed that all the rumors about it were true. It's based on Nvidia's Ampere architecture, and contains 1,536 Nvidia CUDA cores - these are the tiny, basic processors that work together to render the graphics in your games - the more you have, the faster your frame rates.

From that information, and from what we already know about the structure of the Ampere architecture, we can infer that it very probably also contains 12 RT cores for ray tracing, and 48 Tensor cores for AI work, such as DLSS.

Comparatively, the GPU in the Steam Deck is based on the AMD RDNA 2 architecture, which comes from the same generation as the Ampere architecture used in the Switch 2 GPU, so its architecture is of a similar age, despite the Switch 2 only coming out this year. The specs of this GPU are well documented, and it contains 512 stream processors. That doesn't mean it only has a third of the power of the Switch 2's 1,536 CUDA cores, though, as the numbers aren't analogous.

It also has eight RT cores for ray tracing, and no AI hardware, although it can support AMD's FSR tech to improve frame rates further, but bear in mind that this doesn't include FSR 4, and that the versions of FSR supported by the Steam Deck have poorer image quality than DLSS. Both GPUs also employ a 128-bit memory interface and share LPDDR5 RAM with their CPU.

How fast is the Switch 2 GPU?

But which one is faster? From my crude calculations, the Switch 2 GPU is around 53% faster than the Steam Deck GPU when it comes to basic rendering power. Before I give you the full rundown, though, I'll preface these numbers with a disclaimer, which is that these results are based on figures from a Windows test rig, with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X CPU, using GPUs with dedicated VRAM - they're not intended to tell you the exact frame rate you can expect from the Steam Deck and Switch 2 GPUs, but they can give you an indication of the relative rendering power. It's more of a back-of-a-napkin calculation than a foolproof equation.

Anyway, I've run several test games at maximum settings at 1,920 x 1,080, without ray tracing or FSR/DLSS, on an AMD Radeon RX 6600 (RDNA 2) and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 (Ampere) - the test games include Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Cyberpunk 2077, and Metro Exodus.

Both these GPUs have a 128-bit memory interface and use 8GB of 14Gbps GDDR6 VRAM, so the results are roughly comparable beyond the differences between the GPUs. The Radeon RX 6600 was more expensive than the RTX 3050 when it came out, and is faster across the board, but we can account for that by factoring the number of stream processors into our calculation.

The mean average frame rate for the Radeon RX 6600 in these tests is 66fps, while the result for the RTX 3050 is 48fps. Bear in mind that these results don't include ray tracing, though, where the Ampere architecture is significantly quicker than RDNA 2 - I'm just providing an idea of relative rendering power, especially as ray tracing will be a tough ask on a handheld GPU.

Anyway, from these figures, you can then work out roughly how many CUDA cores or stream processors are required to generate an average of 1fps in these games - that's 27 stream processors per 1fps for the RDNA 2 GPU, and 53 CUDA cores per 1fps for the Ampere GPU. We can then predict the frame rate for the two GPUs if they had 512 stream processors and 1,536 CUDA cores respectively.

Again, bear in mind that this is a crude calculation, as neither the Switch 2 nor the Steam Deck runs on Windows, they share system memory, and they also use different very CPUs, while Switch 2 games will have settings that are heavily optimized for the hardware. As such, the results from an actual Steam Deck or Switch 2 are likely to be different - these calculations are only designed to show the difference between the two GPUs at a theoretical level.

The prediction from these calculations is that, all other factors being equal, the Switch 2 GPU should average around 29fps in these games at these settings, if it used Windows, our same CPU, and had 8GB of dedicated GDDR6 VRAM. Meanwhile, the Steam Deck GPU should average around 19fps under the same circumstances. Basically, although they're based on architectures from the same generation, the Switch 2 has considerably more rendering horsepower than the Steam Deck GPU.

Of course, the GPU isn't the only defining feature of a handheld, with the screen, battery life, storage, CPU, and game catalog all being factors to consider too. On this metric alone, though, the Switch 2 wins. This victory may well be short-lived, though, with AMD's new Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme handheld CPU offering 16 RDNA 3.5 compute units, for example, which equates to 1,024 stream processors.

In terms of rendering power, that's twice as powerful as the Steam Deck GPU before you even factor in the improved performance from the jump to a new GPU architecture. The Steam Deck 2 GPU may well end up leapfrogging the Switch 2 again, and the top-end new Asus Xbox handheld will also use this new chip.

I'll be taking a look at more of the differences between the Switch 2 and the Steam Deck over the next few weeks, but if you own a deck already, check out our guide to the best Steam Deck games, all of which have been tested by us on the handheld to ensure they work properly.

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