Wow. It dropped at a rough time, too. BG3 is still going nuts and Starfield is coming soon. It's the kind of thing I'd love to check out but those two (and probably Madden because it's football season) are just going to eat the absolute hell out of my time.
The fact that none of the gambling is happening on their site? The fact that saying it's not allowed isn't magic that allows them to instantly identify bad actors?
It was a stupid hardware split and a stupid statement to make. Sticking to the ridiculous stupidity wasn't possible. You cannot demand feature parity without CPU parity.
The entire console positioning by Xbox is an absolute clusterfuck. Their naming is a shitshow; recycling the naming for a second generation is a bigger shitshow. Making two consoles with different GPU performance for different graphics targets would be fine, but the CPU difference and memory architecture differences are a fucking disaster.
HDDs have been holding back what you can do in open worlds for a while. It (and the PS5 specifically having an extra emphasis on hardware decompression to amp it up further) was the thing I was most excited about for current gen consoles. There were a lot of rumors that PS4 Spider-Man had to cap web slinging speed to allow the HDD to keep up, and we'll see what the movement options are in Starfield and how ships work (unless we know already and I haven't seen it), but even the jet pack boost thing could seriously strain loads in denser areas if it allows enough movement to feel good in opener spaces.
Resolution doesn't change the number of draw calls.
There are plenty of CPU limited games, and they wouldn't have bothered giving the X a higher clock if it didn't mean anything. Anything short of actually identical is a problem when you intend to demand identical features.
"Almost identical" doesn't cut it. The CPU disparity, especially with the much worse memory pipeline, is a big deal.
The lesser memory isn't a big deal when you use high res assets and can just lower the resolution, but it's a huge deal when you use a meaningful portion of it for actual mechanics.
On PC, the point is that you can skip RAM and go straight to VRAM. You still need the assets in memory while you use them. It's faster but it's not that much faster. With unified memory there isn't that distinction. That's one of the ways consoles can be better optimized than a general PC build.
The steam deck is significantly more capable than the PS4. Jaguar's CPUs were absolute dogshit when they launched, let along compared to anything Ryzen.
The problem with a switch 2 is nvidia can't make competent CPUs.