Gamers everywhere are hungry for a way to play games and have many choices, including the Xbox series x, Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck, or Sony Play Station 5.
There are two types of consoles: the stationary variety and portable handheld consoles. The Play Station 5 and Xbox series x fall into the stationary category, while the Nintendo Switch and the steam deck fall into the portable handheld variety.
The stationary consoles are always connected to wall power and are more performant because they can draw more power than the handheld consoles that run off battery power. These handheld consoles have the dual ability to be handheld but also docked and played on a larger screen like the stationary consoles.
By measuring its graphical processing unit’s teraflops per second performance and the physical architecture of the chip, the performance of any console can be estimated. Generally, the older an architecture is, the less performant it is compared to today’s consoles.
Teraflops measure theoretical and computational performance from the number of floating point operations the chip can perform per second.
In pure theoretical performance, the Xbox series x beats out the competition with a graphics processing unit (GPU) capable of 12.15 teraflops of hypothetical performance. The Xbox series x was released in November 2020.
In a close second, Sony’s PlayStation 5, released in November 2020, delivers 10.29 teraflops of theoretical performance.
In third place, the Steam Deck comes in with 1.6 teraflops of possible performance. The Steam Deck was released in February 2022.
In fourth place, the Nintendo Switch came out in March 2017 and had an underwhelming 0.393 teraflops; Nvidia designed the graphics architecture. Due to the Switch being nearly six years old, it was expected to be inferior to modern consoles.
In the end, different game consoles offer other game options, and if your game library is already on one platform, it may be worth staying on that platform. For example, Sony has many games from the ps4 that are backward compatible with the ps5, and Xbox offers backward compatibility going back to the Xbox one. The Switch requires new games to be bought to play them and offers no backward compatibility. The Steam Deck, however, was created by valve. They run the steam game store and allow you to play most of your library of games on steam without buying the same game on a different platform.
