my opinion isn’t based strictly on the header. because to argue that the default is silent mode, when its very reasonable to assume that the middle tier performance mode is the default usecase, because it has a 80W/h battery when compared to typical other handhelds. Steam deck for example uses a 40W/h battery. 17W, which is seeing the chunk of the performance gain, is a very reasonable target for a 80W/h battery. Because it would roughly be equivalent to a steam deck at 10W on its 40W/h battery.

but a game may not necessarily need 13W, thats the point. youre using up more power than what is necessary because the CPU governor doesn’t know if its necessary or not to actually use all 13W.

The steam deck is controlled the same way(has wattage targets), but it understands when its being underused, to use even less resources to maximize battery life.

If you have a car that has gears, where gear 1 is 25, gear 2 is 50 (old cars), it doesn’t mean there aren’t usecases where you want to go 5/10. its unnecessary to always have to hit said target.

the main thing you get back is a better cpu governor to manage power consumption on 2d games. Reviews like the Phawks points out that microsoft kinda handed it off to the handheld makers to optimize for battery life. So in the instances such as getting 8hours of battery life running dead cells because the system doesnt really need to push that much to run the game, the Windows handheld is stuck on a higher performance clock and has a significantly shorter battery life time.

This would be extremely visible if more lighter games are tested, which typically aren’t for reviews like this because its not really fun to show a bunch of games all hitting 60 if you cap framerate.

the bigger wall with switch emulation on android is that mobile companies are terrible at writing gpu drivers when compared to conventional desktop/laptop graphics vendors. its why for example the older snapdragon gen 2/3 outperform their newer snapdragon elite counterparts in emulation.

theres significantly more setup time on mobile because some of the jank doesnt “just work”

ive been using beeper so its a matter if they kill the API in my case. (im surprised they didn’t nuke the API first)

are people expeting devs to infinitely support a game? one that isn’t even on the live service model in the first place?