Technology is really awesome! We managed to squeeze really fast PCs into the size of a Nintendo Switch. Or even a Switch Lite in case of the Ayaneo Air 1S. We could make small PCs before but they used to lag far behind desktop PCs or laptops. Although the super small VAIOs were nevertheless cool.
But now Bethesda’s Starfield is out there and PCs such as Steam Deck can keep up. Maybe not with full detail but running AAA games on such compact hardware was unthinkable back then. You couldn’t take the original Crysis and put it on a super small VAIO and expect it to even remotely keep up. Later UMPCs got stronger ofc but still lagged far behind their bigger siblings. It took us until GPD released the Win 2 to get an Ultrabook processor instead of using weak tablet processors or worse. Nowadays GPD and competitors use AMD APUs which allow us to actually catch up with laptops and PCs. Still not the same as using dedicated graphics but it’s still really good. VR runs okay too and if performance scales just as much over the next years, i think that we can run VR off handheld PCs with AMD really well in about 3 years.
Kid from a lithium mine: “Excuse me ma’am, can you give me something to eat? My boss told me that i can’t get food because i haven’t mined 10 kilograms of lithium today.”
Me: “NO, I’M PLAYING STARFIELD! WITH ONLY 30 FPS MIND YOU!” (kicks child to the ground)
Forget Switch sized. I’m still impressed with Phone Sized. My first computer was a bulky 286 with a full megabyte of RAM and 40MB hard drive space. (Yes, megabytes for both of them, not gigabytes.) I thought that there was no way I’d ever fill up that hard drive.
Now, the phone I’m typing this on is orders of magnitude more powerful and it’s a few years old (and wasn’t even bleeding edge when it was released).
Technology is really awesome! We managed to squeeze really fast PCs into the size of a Nintendo Switch. Or even a Switch Lite in case of the Ayaneo Air 1S. We could make small PCs before but they used to lag far behind desktop PCs or laptops. Although the super small VAIOs were nevertheless cool.
But now Bethesda’s Starfield is out there and PCs such as Steam Deck can keep up. Maybe not with full detail but running AAA games on such compact hardware was unthinkable back then. You couldn’t take the original Crysis and put it on a super small VAIO and expect it to even remotely keep up. Later UMPCs got stronger ofc but still lagged far behind their bigger siblings. It took us until GPD released the Win 2 to get an Ultrabook processor instead of using weak tablet processors or worse. Nowadays GPD and competitors use AMD APUs which allow us to actually catch up with laptops and PCs. Still not the same as using dedicated graphics but it’s still really good. VR runs okay too and if performance scales just as much over the next years, i think that we can run VR off handheld PCs with AMD really well in about 3 years.
Kid from a lithium mine: “Excuse me ma’am, can you give me something to eat? My boss told me that i can’t get food because i haven’t mined 10 kilograms of lithium today.”
Me: “NO, I’M PLAYING STARFIELD! WITH ONLY 30 FPS MIND YOU!” (kicks child to the ground)
Me: “Gotta love modern technology!”
Forget Switch sized. I’m still impressed with Phone Sized. My first computer was a bulky 286 with a full megabyte of RAM and 40MB hard drive space. (Yes, megabytes for both of them, not gigabytes.) I thought that there was no way I’d ever fill up that hard drive.
Now, the phone I’m typing this on is orders of magnitude more powerful and it’s a few years old (and wasn’t even bleeding edge when it was released).