PC gaming absolutely has mainstream appeal, and it's growing. Just not specifically because of the handheld market. By the numbers, anyway. I find people tend to hedge on this. Either the Steam Deck is a consolized solution to PC gaming that makes the Switch obsolete or a bit of an experiment that doesn't need to stack up to mainstream devices.
Yes, PCs (desktop PCs, laptops and handhelds together) are comparable to 4K home consoles these days and lead in some segments. But of those categories the handhelds are the smallest contributor while they are the largest portion of the console market. I love PC handhelds and I'd like to see those proportions shift, but it's interesting that Valve has put a lot of resources behind having a competitive device at a very low price point and we haven't seen more of a change.
On the docked vs handheld thing, Nintendo disclosed that info a few times. This is the first result I found just searching for it. It's recent enough that there were already a hundred million of the things in the wild, so I don't expect it'll have changed much.
As for the mini PC thing... yeah, sure. I mean, I'm not sayng they don't do the thing, I'm saying whenever I sit to look at the optimal solution for a problem the mini PCs never seem to come out on top. A PC for an older person taht doesn't need a ton of computing power? I went with an Android tablet with a detachable keyboard last time, they are delighted at having a laptop-style thing and a tablet to watch media that works like their phone. A low power device to run some specific application? I can probably find some cheap SBC somewhere I can get running passively with a heatsink and will do the job. A portable gaming solution? I have laptops with dedicated GPUs around that are older but much faster than most mini PCs. Also, they have a screen, so there's that. A set-top box? I can put something together for cheaper in the same performance range.
There are valid use cases. Sure, if you need a dozen of these things to embed in desktops, or something you can mount behind a screen, or... something to run a FGC tourney for cheap, apparently, there are reasons to use them. I just haven't found they provided a better alternative than other devices for most of the uses I personally have.
It is atypical, and certainly a medical issue, but I'm not alone there by any means. People who like these do tend to be loud and proud about it, so they stand out more, but it's worth pointing out that any time Valve has tried to have them as a primary input they had to either reintroduce sticks alongside them or swap them out for sticks altogether. Accessibility wise I know people who share my issues and people who say they interact better with their own mobility problems. That's always the case with ergonomics and accessibility issues. On the plus side, that has taken me into a lively and very expensive habit of controller collecting, so... yay for me.
FWIW, I'm aware of the functionality, which works just as well with a modifier button and a stick. Those things and a lot of the features attached to them are, and have always been, a solution looking for a problem. There are very few games where the developer hasn't provided a viable control mapping that the Steam layers turn into a comfortable gaming experience. In most cases if it's not intended to be used with a controller I'd much rather go sit somewhere with a mouse and keyboard.
Yeeeah, I don't know that "it'd slot in next to the Nomad" is a ringing endorsement of mainstream appeal.
You, by the way, are not in the majority in your usage pattern for the Switch. Every bit of info available suggests that handheld vs docked use of the Switch is pretty much evenly split. Which is surprising to me, because I see it as a handheld first and foremost.
I do agree that it'll be interesting to see how the Switch 2 fares in a market where it's not the only thing in its class, but if I had to place any bets, they have a humongous lead despite PC handhelds having been around for ages and the Deck having taken a very good stab at competitive pricing and performance a whole three years ago (what is even time, holy crap).
As for mini PCs... Man, I don't get mini PCs. I'm very much an early adopter of weird tech, I have more SBCs and handheld devices than I know what to do with, but... who wants a screenless laptop? Or an underpowered, overpriced desktop? I can see some use cases for it, I've had some NUCs and thin clients here and there, I just don't think the value proposition is there to use them even as a media device. But hey, it's a small but clearly competitive space, and if this gen APUs do indeed match a 4060 desktop level of performance when fed enough power maybe that starts to make sense next to a Xbox Series S or something as a gaming device. We'll see.
For the record, I do have a PC plugged into a TV for gaming, mostly made out of spares and hand-me-downs built into a smaller, less garish case. I haven't seen a mini PC that made me question that choice yet. I'm open to having my mind changed, it just hasn't happened yet.
As a touchpad, maybe. But they're not being used as a touchpad, they're being used as this weird physical input substitute thing that is meant to work with your thumb. Two thumbs, actually. Sliding my thumb that way while holding the thing I'm using causes excruciating pain almost immediately, but even in the brief period until it does it's less functional than a large touchpad, let alone a mouse or a stick.
I know some people swear by them, I just don't think they're worth the space they take up as a pointer device and I don't think they're particularly useful as anything else.
But hey, that's the point of PCs, right? People who agree with me can get the Legion Go S with the actually good Thinkpad-style optical nub and people who like playing games by scratching a plastic square for some reason can stick to the Deck.
Man, I strongly dislike the touchpads on all of Valve's controllers. They just hurt my wrists a bunch.
I prefer the optical nub on the GPD Win, which I noticed is making a reappearance in the Legion Go S, actually, so that's a step up for me. Not that I'm in the market for a handheld this gen, I'm mostly set.
Of course the weird mouse mode thing of the big boy Legion Go is a much better brute force solution than either, if you need to use one for any stretch of time beyond clicking the one thing. It's going to be very weird have that turn out to be the model for the Switch 2's mouse gimmick if and when that gets confirmed.
To put it in perspective there are 150 million Switches and 75 million PS5s out there. And 15 million Wii Us, if anybody is counting. This puts PC handhelds some ways ahead of the N-Gage and well behind the Game Gear.
I'm less concerned about who's ahead in the handheld PC market and more interested on whether it'll ever become a mass market space. I think a lot depends on prices for integrated GPUs not skyrocketing like their desktop counterparts and their performance stepping up a notch or two. We'll see.
Maybe one grenade, though. Or two. I can take three, maybe. Look, I'm saying there is a right number of grenades in my tank and it's not very high, but it's definitely not zero.
Ah, so you meant DLSS to mean specifically "DLSS Frame Generation". I agree that the fact that both upscaling and frame gen share the same brand name is confusing, but when I hear DLSS I typically think upscaling (which would actually improve your latency, all else being equal).
Frame gen is only useful in specific use cases, and I agree that when measuring performance you shouldn't do so with it on by default, particularly for anything below 100-ish fps. It certainly doesn't make a 5070 run like a 5090, no matter how many intermediate frames you generate.
But again, you keep going off on these conspiracy tangents on things that don't need a conspiracy to suck. Nvidia isn't keeping vram artificially low as a ploy to keep people from running LLMs, they're keeping vram low for cost cutting. You can run chatbots just fine on 16, let alone on 24 or 32 gigs for the halo tier cards, and there are (rather slow) ways around hard vram limits for larger models these days.
You don't need some weird conspiracy to keep local AI away from the masses. They just... want money and have people that will pay them more for all that fast ram elsewhere while the gaming bros will still shell out cash for the gaming GPUs with the lower RAM. Reality isn't any better than your take on it, it's just... more straightforward and boring.
That is a rather astonishing mix of really granular quoting of more or less accurate facts and borderline conspiracy theorist level misinformation. You rarely see this stuff outside political channels, I'm... mildly impressed.
AMD absolutely does have stock in back rooms, largely because they have been doing a somewhat undignified dance of waiting to see what Nvidia does to decide what they're pricing their current gen at. Most educated guesses out there are that they were going to price higher, were caught on the wrong foot with Nvidia's MSRP announcement and had to work out how to re-price cards that were already in the retail channel. And now Nvidia is in turn delaying the 5070 to interfere with AMD's new dates. Because both of these companies suck.
On the plus side for consumers, there's some hope that the 9070 will be repriced somewhat affordably and that it won't underperform against at least the 5070, if not the 5070Ti. We'll see what reviews have to say about it.
Your summary of why the launch was so light includes some real stuff (yeah, partners struggle to match Nvidia's aggressive pricing and have terrible margins), but that's not why there was no stock of the 5090 (most reports suggest the GPUs were simply not being manufactured early enough to provide chips to anybody. 5080s were both more readily available and less appealing, so they're easier to find, which kinda pokes big holes in that hypothesis. Manufacturing timelines seem to also explain why restocking will be slow.
I'm also very confused about why you'd "turn off DLSS". Are you allowing people to use FSR, at least? That's a weird proviso. The reason they would misrepresent the impact of MFG is obviously good old marketing. Even if AMD didn't exist, the 40 series does and they have a big issue with justifying a lot of the 50 series line against it. With the 5080 falling well behind the 4090 they have a clear incentive for suggesting you can match the 4090 in cheaper cards. This doesn't tell you anything about the performance of the 9070 one way or the other. It does tell you a lot of the performance of the 5080, though.
See, this is why this sort of propagandistic speech works so well, it takes for ever to even cover all the misrepresentations and all this is going to do is get you to double down on some of these unsubstantiated statements and turn it into a "matter of opinion". It doesn't even need to be on purpose, it's just easier to produce than to counter.
Aaaand now I made myself sad.
In any case, here's hoping the 9070 is a competitive option and readily available. They've apparently scheduled that delayed event for the 28th, so I'll be curious to see what they bring to the table officially.
Oh, they're absolutely not retaking a huge chunk of the dedicated GPU market. I think what's realistic to expect if they have a good launch (readily available stock, competitive performance and price) is that they may regain a couple points of desktop install base and at least get to sell that they're moving in the right direction instead of abandoning that space altogether. Maybe some growth on handhelds and competitive iGPUs for laptops and tablets so it makes sense for them to continue to develop the gaming GPU business aggressively at least.
With the 5070 at a 550 MSRP I wouldn't be suprised to see AMD matching that for similar performance. Given all the delay shenanigans it'd be shocking for them to deliberately wait for the 5070 info and then launch with a more expensive part.
How much you end up having to pay to get one is anybody's guess, of course, as MSRP is increasingly meaningless. Since they've had cards with retailers for a while and have been delaying there may actually be some stock at launch, though. We'll see.
The idea that it would "smoke the 5070" and "nearly match the 5080" is probably just fanboyism or they wouldn't have ducked out from directly pitching it after the 5070 reveal (and if they had a 500 dollar 5080 competitor they wouldn't be cancelling their high end cards this gen).
In any case, it's immensely dumb to fanboy for multibillion dollar chip manufacturers. I just hope people can buy good, affordable GPUs from multiple manufacturers at some point. I own GPUs from Intel, AMD and Nvidia and would really want them all to remain competitive in as many pricing segments as possible.
There are a couple of different things here. The 50 series launch was a bit of a paper launch, especially for the 5090. Scalping obviously happened, but the issue seems to have been very few cards being available, not as much high demand.
A different question is what the things that are available are worth and how they're selling. It's not impossible to find popular parts, but finding popular parts at MSRP is hard, with crazy markups changing day-to-day. I bought a CPU last year at MSRP and despite being a last-gen part that has since received a direct replacement, today it's 100 bucks more expensive from the same retailer.
Yeah, the modern experience of retro games is super different in all sorts of ways.
All of that is 100% true. Conversely, a lot of stuff I was fine with in games at the time now seems unbearable. Old games that were great in context now aren't and games that nobody knew existed now hold up great and have become cult classics.
Which is why preservation isn't just about making the games playable, you also need some sort of record of how they were perceived at the time and why.
I'm overthinking some random meme about old game nostalgia, as usual, but none of this is wrong.