The Nintendo Switch is undeniably one of the most popular handheld gaming consoles in the market and like most devices of its kind, it is something of a Sunday treat in the modding community. For YouTuber Geekerwan, they recently posted a video on how they successfully got the console to run modern PC games.
To provide a quick breakdown on how they did it, Geekerwan basically started with a bootloader and the installation of Android OS. After a bit of tweaking on their part, they then installed the Ubuntu OS, which then opened up the door to the installation of other programs, such as the Steam games launcher.
This is one of the more impressive feats that we’ve seen someone in the Switch modding community achieve, especially when you consider the console’s already archaic hardware. As a quick primer, the Nintendo handheld is powered by the NVIDIA Tegra X1 SoC, a chipset that was released almost a decade ago, in 2015. Off the shelf, the CPU and GPU cores of the chipset run at 1GHz and 768MHz, respectively.
In the case of Geekerwan’s modified Switch console, they boosted the Tegra X1’s speed significantly, with the CPU and GPU running at 2.3GHz and 1.267GHz, respectively. In addition, they also overclocked the onboard memory subsystem, from 1,600MHz to 2,500MHz. Boosting the latter is both important and beneficial for integrated graphics, as it usually provides a massive performance boost.
Getting back on point, all the tweaks made by Geekerwan to their Switch allowed them to run their full suite of PC Games, with AAA titles such as God of War being one of them. But as these things usually go, the modified Switch’s performance is limited by its own hardware; framerates for the console isn’t quite up to par and as you can see in the video, the average frames vary between five and 30 fps and as you can see in the video, games like Titanfall 2 and God of War, the stuttering is clearly visible.
(Source: Geekerwan via YouTube, Videocardz)
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