Rumor: Nintendo Switch will be Weaker than PS4

Nintendo has been extremely secretive about the Switch, and it’s not hard to understand why. Historically, they’ve always been trying (and oftentimes, succeeding) at staying innovative and fresh, and there’s probably a reasonable fear from the folks at Nintendo that saying too much about the Switch could get them some undue competition. It only took a year, or so, for the Xbox 360 and PS3 to steal the Wii’s motion control tech to try to use it themselves, and just looking at how quickly VR was able to evolve following the success of the Oculus Rift shows that it’s not unreasonable to assume that having a lengthy launch period could see Switch-like devices crop up on the market before Nintendo has a chance to lay stakes to the unique market the Switch offers.

But that haste could come at a heavy price: according to the folks at Venture Beat, in order to expedite the production and shipping of the Switch, Nintendo is using an outdated graphics card. Specifically, for you tech-minded folks, they’re using Maxwell Tegra chips, rather than the Pascal chips that were released this year.

So what’s that mean for our less tech-minded friends?

The Nintendo Switch will be weaker than the PS4, in terms of graphical fidelity. The Vanilla PS4, the upcoming 4K version will be light years better. So I wouldn’t hold my breath on a VR version of the Switch.

I knew Nintendo was desperate to replace the Wii U, and they’ve never been big on the whole graphics game, but… still, I fear their paranoia might be costing them long-term. We’ll just have to see how well it performs when they do those live demos later, but I suddenly have a lot less confidence in Nintendo’s upcoming console. After all, it’ll be hard to convince companies to make triple-A games for the title if it's so far behind…