The resolution, the weight, the battery life and potentially the cooling are all sub-par. There's also the fact that this can't compete with the Switch due to the simple fact that games are optimized to run at a stable framerate by the developers or subcontracted companies for the Switch, while this will just run games from Steam at a low-res and hope for the best.
Even some first party Nintendo games can't be relied on to run at a stable framerate so I'm going to have to disagree with you there. Link's Awakening has some nasty and inconsistent stutter issues, Breath of the Wild runs better than on the Wii U but it still has its moments.
Then you have games like Hyrule Warriors where it just feels actively bad.
Lots of Switch Games actually run a lot better under even a very mild overclock (Nintendo even officially lets the CPU get OC'd during loading screens for limited periods of time, to great effect).
This is beating the Switch on most aspects outside of first-party Nintendo library.
I think a lot of the performance problems on the switch occur when you set the resolution of the device to anything outside a fixed 720p.
I've definitely had issues with 1st party titles, but after going into the settings and forcing 720p, some did go away. At the end of the day I mostly play my Switch in docked mode with an mClassic, so the forced 720p doesn't typically detract from the experience.
However, many 3rd party titles on the Switch are just actively bad ports. Omensight, for example, which is an otherwise good game has the most atrocious port I've ever seen on a console. I would agree with you that the thread parent is off-the-mark in saying that Valve will do worse here -- PC settings are notoriously better than what you get from traditional consoles since you can actively choose to optimize them to your environment, instead of hoping some developer took the time to even try.
> There's also the fact that this can't compete with the Switch due to the simple fact that games are optimized to run at a stable framerate by the developers or subcontracted companies for the Switch
I have a pretty extensive Switch library and can definitely say that performance of ports is really hit or miss.
This is also missing that PC games are already designed with a broad range of hardware in mind and nearly every game for PC has extensive settings to control graphical quality vs performance.
Sure, maybe a device like this might have performance issues but I don't think the Switch completely trumps this in terms delivering playable experiences.
Switch is infamous for adding lots of input lag to its PC ports (like hollow knight). Not to mention the abysmal online experience. The steam deck looks like it will destroy it for any third party title.
This sounds like a tv issue rather than a switch issue. Monitor != tv. Having played hollow knight on both PC and switch, I can say that I haven't felt any noticeable difference. In general one should expect between 30-100 ms input lag, depending on the tv model. Even with gaming mode enabled, some tv models are simply terrible for gaming.
Playing in handheld mode, there should be no input lag at all.
It's been measured around 7 frames of lag, so 120ms [0]. PC in comparison is around 2-3 frames of input lag. That thread is pretty old though so may be out of date now.
