It’s Monday, meaning it’s time for us to publicly deploy the latest edition of DF Direct Weekly – and one of the topics covered this week concerns evidence from Activision’s Bobby Kotick to the FTC during the Microsoft trial, more specifically the idea that he was briefed on the technology last year and believes that the hardware ‘has closer alignment’ with the last-gen consoles. This raises an interesting question: how can this be the case in a world where strongly sourced rumours suggests that Epic Games has its The Matrix Awakens demo running on target Switch 2 hardware?
The concept of ‘target hardware’ has always raised some concerns when it comes to accurately representing what an actual retail console can deliver, but everything I’m hearing about the machine does sound quite promising. For now, let’s focus instead on the concept of closer alignment to the last-gen systems. The issue here is that an assessment of basic horsepower factors out so much of what makes a particular piece of gaming hardware unique.
The original Switch makes a pretty good case, but the Steam Deck is an even more obvious example. Where we’ve been able to benchmark the system in like-for-like terms against PlayStation 4 (for example, using God of War’s PS4-a-like ‘original’ settings) I found that the Deck delivers at 800p what the Sony console offers up at 1080p. However, in other titles, we’ve seen closer parity between Deck and PS4. Contrary to this narrative though, it’s also possible to run PS5 exclusive Ratchet and Clank rather well on the Valve handheld. There’s a strong argument that it’s not the level of horsepower that’s important, but rather how well it is deployed.
