why is everyone so surprised that nintendo switch could run Doom?

[coolaid]

 

why is everyone reacting with such astonishment when they saw the nintendo switch console running doom 2016?

 

i remember running the E3 Demo Alpha of doom 3 on my old nvidia TNT2 card back in 2002. a couple of years later i also got the retail version of doom 3 running on that same TNT2 card again with the help of the 3DFX community who helped me set up the doom 3 voodoo patch in order to make it work (though we still had to edit some things as the patch was only meant for voodoo cards, but it worked nonetheless)

 

 

as you can see, DOOM 2016 also works on a Geforce GT210, granted it ran pooly but the point is that Doom 2016 could run on the lowest budget graphics card from a few years ago. with that said i find it odd that so many people are raving and gasping in surprise at the fact that nintendo switch could run doom 2016 at 30fps. i thought the nintendo switch is powered by a decent enough next gen graphics card that could at leat push out a couple of teraflops?

 

maybe i'm missing something here but i don't understand why its such a technical feat for the switch to run doom, since its such a new piece of hardware afterall.

Edited October 23, 2017 by beautifulman2999

[MFG38]

Tried looking for the CPU and GPU specs of the Switch, but no luck. All I could was find was that the console appears to run a custom processor based on Nvidia's Tegra series. Either way, I'd agree that's enough reason to hold our horses.

[Jaxxoon R]

I think Breath of the Wild chugging so hard at launch might've soured people's expectations. So a PS4 title running rather well on the system might've changed a few opinions.

[Koko Ricky]

I think it's surprising not that it could run it at all, but that it's running it at a very respectable level of detail. It's no secret that the last few Nintendo consoles have been significantly less powerful than its contemporaries, so I don't think many of us were expecting a Doom port. The screen/texture resolution is lower, the shadows are less detailed and the overall game is slightly fuzzier, but it looks terrific. 

[Linguica]

I don't think it's as much "wow, Doom 2016 runs on the Switch?" as it is "wow, Doom 2016 runs on the Switch?" For a modern AAA game to have that much scalability that it can still run decently on a significantly lower powered system is pretty rare nowadays.

[Nevander]

Because it's Nintendo.