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so for the last few years we’ve had to listen to developers absolutely losing their minds over how the xbox series s is supposedly “holding back the generation” and honestly? it’s getting kind of old

like, i get it. you want to use the shiny new unreal engine 5 features to render the individual pores on a random npc’s nose that i’m just going to sprint past at 60mph anyway. but fwiw, blaming the series s for your poorly optimized game is basically like volunteering to be a pawn in big brother and then acting completely blindsided when you inevitably get evicted. it’s not the house’s fault you made a BAD play

let’s just be real for a second. the series s, the steam deck, and now the nintendo switch 2 are probably the best things to happen to modern gaming because they finally forced the industry to stop relying on brute force hardware and actually learn how to optimize their code again

for a while there it felt like the industry was just in this endless arms race to 4K where publishers fully expected you to buy a $1500 rig just to hit a stable framerate and if you didn’t then you were just out of luck and had to play the game looking like a blurry potato. but then valve dropped the steam deck and suddenly the 800p revolution happened. developers realized they couldn’t just ignore a massive chunk of the market that plays their games on a glorified linux tablet while lying in bed trying to avoid doing actual work. something like 40% of devs are actively targeting the steam deck now, which is wild. they actually had to figure out how to make ui text readable on a smaller screen, implement quick saves for short sessions, and use FSR properly instead of just throwing VRAM at the problem until it goes away

and the switch 2 is basically doing the exact same thing. nintendo essentially gave developers a custom nvidia chip with DLSS and ray tracing but capped the power draw so it doesn’t melt in your hands while you’re holding it. it forces studios to use smart upscaling and feature parity rather than just brute-forcing the resolution. if you can get massive AAA games to run at a stable framerate on a handheld device by using custom presets, baking the lighting, and lowering the texture budget, then there is ZERO excuse for a game to run poorly on a high-end console

the truth is that balancing games for these “lower-powered” devices creates a baseline that benefits literally everyone. when a studio is forced to optimize memory allocation just to get their game running on the series s, those exact same optimizations make the ps5 and series x versions run even smoother. when they build granular performance toggles, scalable assets, and better dead zone management for the steam deck, the entire pc ecosystem wins. it’s the trickle-up effect of actually doing your job

it’s just wild to me that people ever bought into the narrative that efficiency is the enemy of progress. if your game runs like a powerpoint presentation on a machine that can comfortably handle modern titles, maybe the hardware isn’t actually the issue???

anyway…

if you’re curious about how the hardware holds up these days, this video breaks down the steam deck’s real-world performance and why it’s still completely relevant to the current market