6 ms·

Nintendo Switch 2 Slammed for Poor Display–120 Hz with 30 FPS Response Times

21 points by kristianp 1y ago

v5v3 1y ago
I would guess majority of Switch audience is very young and won't care.
- frollogaston 1y ago
  If the response time is really 33ms, maybe they'd be able to tell playing Super Smash Bros. I remember as a kid wondering why Melee felt so weird on one TV.
- AIPedant 1y ago
  It's hard to find reliable data but it seems most Switch 1 players (not just owners) are in the 20-30 demographic: https://www.shacknews.com/article/127542/nintendo-discloses-switch-age-demographic-data-for-first-time https://www.shacknews.com/article/127542/nintendo-discloses-... Although Nintendo is still clearly targeting families relative to XBox/Sony, the Switch itself has a lot of adult games (e.g. the Cyberpunk port).
- wil421 1y ago
  According to slide 8 that’s not the case at all. https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2021/211105e.pdf https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2021/211105e.pdf
  - v5v3 1y ago
    What if the adult creates the account and them gives the switch to a kid? How would Nintendo know who is playing. Ai answer for definition of 'annual playing users' as per that slide: Nintendo defines *"Annual Playing Users"* as the number of unique users (based on Nintendo Accounts registered to Switch systems) who played software on the Nintendo Switch during a given 12-month period. This metric includes all active players across age groups and regions, regardless of whether they share a single console or own multiple units. ### Key Details: 1. *Scope*: Counts users who engaged with any Switch software within a year, not tied to hardware sales (e.g., one console can have multiple players) . 2. *Growth Trend*: Nintendo reported *129 million Annual Playing Users in 2024*, up from 127 million in 2023, reflecting sustained engagement despite the Switch’s aging lifecycle . 3. *Demographics*: Includes a broad age range (kids to seniors) and a near-even gender split (50/50 male/female) . 4. *Exclusions*: Does not differentiate between casual or frequent players—only active participation in the year is required . This metric helps Nintendo gauge platform engagement beyond raw hardware sales, emphasizing its hybrid model’s shared-use potential .
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  - frollogaston 1y ago
    Notice how there's a big spike at age 21. Slides were made in 2021. How many Switch owners were supposedly born on 1/1/00? That and any young kids are less likely to be setting it up themselves.
deleted 1y ago
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zapzupnz 1y ago
The comments on that article are wild. They're of people who seemingly play tech specs rather than actual games. All that mixed in with plenty of people spouting some of the talking points about the screen protector, how the screen in supposedly fragile, etc. that also applied to the Switch OLED. All in all, a lot of unjustifiable, manufactured rage from people who neither own the console nor ever intended to get one. For $500, were people expecting to put an LG G5 in their backpacks? Also, I know that we don't editorialise titles on HN, but I wish we could for this: "30 FPS response times" comes directly from the article, but they mean "30 ms", not "30 FPS".
- frollogaston 1y ago
  The "30FPS" part is about how 1/0.030s = 33.33. The article also says "While testing was conducted at 60 FPS, the response times even fall short of this low bar, with 16.67 ms being the slowest response time required for the pixels to refresh between frames such as to avoid blur or smearing." Tbh I don't understand this, I thought refresh rate and response time were totally independent, but 1/0.01667 = 60. And yeah people complaining about Nintendo hardware is an old thing. Wii can't play BluRay, GameCube can't play DVD, N64 not enough RAM, and before that games/consoles were compared by data bus size. Doesn't really matter usually, except some N64 games were annoyingly laggy like 007 GoldenEye.
  - khedoros1 1y ago
    I think the point is that if you've got a 120Hz refresh rate but a 30ms response time, the slow response time negates a lot of the benefit of the high refresh rate. You end up with a sliding window of 4 frames of video smeared together.
    - frollogaston 1y ago
      Ah I misunderstood what response time even is. I thought the whole screen is updating 120 times per second but it's delayed by 30ms, so it looks the same but you perceive input lag. That's not how it works.
  - 1y ago
davidhyde 1y ago
> “ While testing was conducted at 60 FPS, the response times even fall short of this low bar, with 16.67 ms being the slowest response time required for the pixels to refresh between frames” Well it’s actually 16.66 ms (1000 / 60). You can’t round up. A render loop that takes just a fraction more than the absolute minimum above would neck down to 30fps.
- addaon 1y ago
  > Well it’s actually 16.66 ms (1000 / 60). You can’t round up. A render loop that takes just a fraction more than the absolute minimum above would neck down to 30fps. This is about response time, not render loop time. Response time is the analog time required to transition a physical subpixel from one brightness level to another, usually measuring from when the transition starts. A 16.67 ms response time does indeed mean that with a 16.66(6) ms frame period it's still 0.003(3) ms away from completing the transition... but that just means that it's an immeasurable fraction away from the commanded brightness at that time, not that there will be rippling effects to the next frame or anything.
tibbydudeza 1y ago
Nintendo owners do not care about tech specs - to them the games is what matters.
- frollogaston 1y ago
  Specifically, are the games written in Rust? (jk)
  - Klonoar 1y ago
    This isn’t even funny, let alone relevant to the discussion.
lincon127 1y ago
Checks out
UltraSane 1y ago
An LCD with a claimed refresh rate of n hertz really is implied to have a max GtG latency of 1000ms / n. Anything higher seems dishonest and rather stupid.
philosophty 1y ago
It seems like a headless Nintendo Switch 2 that was -$100 might sell a lot of units.
- freeone3000 1y ago
  You might be looking for an Nvidia Jetson Orin Nano, which is the dev board version of the switch 2 base chip. Nvidia sells them for $249.
  - smt88 1y ago
    How is that anything like a Switch 2? It can't play the games, which is the entire point.
- toast0 1y ago
  I wanted that for the switch 1, and then Nintendo started selling a lite with no dock instead. Probably most other people use their switches differently than I do. I guess you could get a switch that someone broke the screen, maybe for $100 less.
neighbour 1y ago
I would guess that the overlap between people deeply concerned about display response times and those excited to buy a Switch 2 is tiny. Most Switch buyers aren’t chasing cutting-edge codecs, they’re buying it for Splatoon, Zelda, Mario, and Animal Crossing. Nintendo’s audience has always prioritised unique first-party games and portability over hardware specs. Speaking from experience, I've been thoroughly enjoying the Switch 2. Even if I knew about this information before I bought the console, it would not impact my purchase decision.
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21 points by kristianp 1y ago

v5v3 1y ago

I would guess majority of Switch audience is very young and won't care.

frollogaston 1y ago
If the response time is really 33ms, maybe they'd be able to tell playing Super Smash Bros. I remember as a kid wondering why Melee felt so weird on one TV.
AIPedant 1y ago
It's hard to find reliable data but it seems most Switch 1 players (not just owners) are in the 20-30 demographic: https://www.shacknews.com/article/127542/nintendo-discloses-switch-age-demographic-data-for-first-time https://www.shacknews.com/article/127542/nintendo-discloses-... Although Nintendo is still clearly targeting families relative to XBox/Sony, the Switch itself has a lot of adult games (e.g. the Cyberpunk port).
wil421 1y ago
According to slide 8 that’s not the case at all. https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2021/211105e.pdf https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2021/211105e.pdf
- v5v3 1y ago
  What if the adult creates the account and them gives the switch to a kid? How would Nintendo know who is playing. Ai answer for definition of 'annual playing users' as per that slide: Nintendo defines *"Annual Playing Users"* as the number of unique users (based on Nintendo Accounts registered to Switch systems) who played software on the Nintendo Switch during a given 12-month period. This metric includes all active players across age groups and regions, regardless of whether they share a single console or own multiple units. ### Key Details: 1. *Scope*: Counts users who engaged with any Switch software within a year, not tied to hardware sales (e.g., one console can have multiple players) . 2. *Growth Trend*: Nintendo reported *129 million Annual Playing Users in 2024*, up from 127 million in 2023, reflecting sustained engagement despite the Switch’s aging lifecycle . 3. *Demographics*: Includes a broad age range (kids to seniors) and a near-even gender split (50/50 male/female) . 4. *Exclusions*: Does not differentiate between casual or frequent players—only active participation in the year is required . This metric helps Nintendo gauge platform engagement beyond raw hardware sales, emphasizing its hybrid model’s shared-use potential .
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- frollogaston 1y ago
  Notice how there's a big spike at age 21. Slides were made in 2021. How many Switch owners were supposedly born on 1/1/00? That and any young kids are less likely to be setting it up themselves.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

zapzupnz 1y ago

The comments on that article are wild. They're of people who seemingly play tech specs rather than actual games. All that mixed in with plenty of people spouting some of the talking points about the screen protector, how the screen in supposedly fragile, etc. that also applied to the Switch OLED. All in all, a lot of unjustifiable, manufactured rage from people who neither own the console nor ever intended to get one. For $500, were people expecting to put an LG G5 in their backpacks? Also, I know that we don't editorialise titles on HN, but I wish we could for this: "30 FPS response times" comes directly from the article, but they mean "30 ms", not "30 FPS".

frollogaston 1y ago
The "30FPS" part is about how 1/0.030s = 33.33. The article also says "While testing was conducted at 60 FPS, the response times even fall short of this low bar, with 16.67 ms being the slowest response time required for the pixels to refresh between frames such as to avoid blur or smearing." Tbh I don't understand this, I thought refresh rate and response time were totally independent, but 1/0.01667 = 60. And yeah people complaining about Nintendo hardware is an old thing. Wii can't play BluRay, GameCube can't play DVD, N64 not enough RAM, and before that games/consoles were compared by data bus size. Doesn't really matter usually, except some N64 games were annoyingly laggy like 007 GoldenEye.
- khedoros1 1y ago
  I think the point is that if you've got a 120Hz refresh rate but a 30ms response time, the slow response time negates a lot of the benefit of the high refresh rate. You end up with a sliding window of 4 frames of video smeared together.
  - frollogaston 1y ago
    Ah I misunderstood what response time even is. I thought the whole screen is updating 120 times per second but it's delayed by 30ms, so it looks the same but you perceive input lag. That's not how it works.
- 1y ago

davidhyde 1y ago

> “ While testing was conducted at 60 FPS, the response times even fall short of this low bar, with 16.67 ms being the slowest response time required for the pixels to refresh between frames” Well it’s actually 16.66 ms (1000 / 60). You can’t round up. A render loop that takes just a fraction more than the absolute minimum above would neck down to 30fps.

addaon 1y ago
> Well it’s actually 16.66 ms (1000 / 60). You can’t round up. A render loop that takes just a fraction more than the absolute minimum above would neck down to 30fps. This is about response time, not render loop time. Response time is the analog time required to transition a physical subpixel from one brightness level to another, usually measuring from when the transition starts. A 16.67 ms response time does indeed mean that with a 16.66(6) ms frame period it's still 0.003(3) ms away from completing the transition... but that just means that it's an immeasurable fraction away from the commanded brightness at that time, not that there will be rippling effects to the next frame or anything.

tibbydudeza 1y ago

Nintendo owners do not care about tech specs - to them the games is what matters.

frollogaston 1y ago
Specifically, are the games written in Rust? (jk)
- Klonoar 1y ago
  This isn’t even funny, let alone relevant to the discussion.

lincon127 1y ago

Checks out

UltraSane 1y ago

An LCD with a claimed refresh rate of n hertz really is implied to have a max GtG latency of 1000ms / n. Anything higher seems dishonest and rather stupid.

philosophty 1y ago

It seems like a headless Nintendo Switch 2 that was -$100 might sell a lot of units.

freeone3000 1y ago
You might be looking for an Nvidia Jetson Orin Nano, which is the dev board version of the switch 2 base chip. Nvidia sells them for $249.
- smt88 1y ago
  How is that anything like a Switch 2? It can't play the games, which is the entire point.
toast0 1y ago
I wanted that for the switch 1, and then Nintendo started selling a lite with no dock instead. Probably most other people use their switches differently than I do. I guess you could get a switch that someone broke the screen, maybe for $100 less.

neighbour 1y ago

I would guess that the overlap between people deeply concerned about display response times and those excited to buy a Switch 2 is tiny. Most Switch buyers aren’t chasing cutting-edge codecs, they’re buying it for Splatoon, Zelda, Mario, and Animal Crossing. Nintendo’s audience has always prioritised unique first-party games and portability over hardware specs. Speaking from experience, I've been thoroughly enjoying the Switch 2. Even if I knew about this information before I bought the console, it would not impact my purchase decision.

deleted 1y ago
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deleted 1y ago
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