Nintendo Switch console overclocked and modded to run modern PC games

[Shawn Knight]

In brief: The Nintendo Switch is arguably one of the greatest handheld consoles ever launched, and it becomes even more versatile if you're willing to take the steps to break free from Nintendo's walled garden and ramp up its clock speeds.

Shortly after the launch of Tears of the Kingdom, Dimitris from Modern Vintage Gamer published a piece chronicling efforts to overclock the Switch in order to squeeze more performance out of the latest Zelda title. A recent video from YouTuber Geekerwan takes things a step further by introducing a different operating system to unlock a whole new realm of games.

Using a custom bootloader, Geekerwan was able to download an Android image and flash it to the console. While some might stop here and enjoy all the games available on the Android platform, Geekerwan forged ahead and flashed Linux onto the Switch.

Leveraging a handful of additional tools including Wine, Box64, and DXVK, the modder was able to run Windows games on the Switch. Getting everything to work in unison was no easy task but in the end, Geekerwan prevailed.

As you might have guessed, the Switch struggled to run AAA Windows-based games thanks largely in part to its dated hardware and the many translation layers in place.

In Titanfall 2, performance hovered between 15-25 frames per second although audio issues would likely keep most players at bay. At 720p with normal graphics settings, the Switch was only able to muster high single-digit frame rates in Grand Theft Auto V, making it totally unplayable. In Devil May Cry 5, the best you can hope for is around 15 frames per second. God of War does technically run but at an average FPS of less than 10, it's not worth the frustration.

While Geekerwan proved that it is possible to run modern Windows games on the Switch, there's really not much of a case to be made for jumping through all of the hoops to do so. Simply put, the Switch – even with a significant overclock – lacks the requisite muscle for even a borderline enjoyable experience. If gaming on the go is a must, you'd be best served with one of several other dedicated handheld PC systems.

Image credit: Aleks Dorohovich

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https://www.techspot.com/news/99535-nintendo-switch-overclocked-modded-run-modern-pc-games.html

 

[DZillaXx]

Not surprising considering A57 cores are slow, they were outdated when the switch released.

 

[Porkous]

How powerful is the GPU and CPU In a modern mobile device these days?

Its kind of awful we barely scratched the surface of what is possible on mobiles.

If the switch can run Witcher 3 on that GPU, imagine latest tech, what it could do on latest Snapdragon which can run genshin impact pc like title to 4k 30+ fps on max settings, right?

 

[hwertz]

I'm pleased to see Box64 can do this at all though. I had a Acer chromebook with a Nvidia Tegra K1 (quad-core ARM, and a GPU about equivalent in speed to a GTX650, a much-newer-than-GTX650 Kepler GPU but cut down to use 5W of power versus the GTX650's 75W or so.) I got qemu to run 32-bit and 64-bit x86 binaries (a bit odd to be able to run 64-bit binaries on a 32-bit CPU, but since it was emulating all the instructions anyway it worked)... but qemu did not run multi-threaded apps properly, so wine worked but only for like minesweeper and notepad (almost every windows application uses threads, and games certainly do.) I did have a Samsung (binary blob) printer driver and a handful of other miscellaneous x86/x86-64 bins I ran, they seamlessly ran under emulation.

Nice to see that Box64 now fully supports running complex x86/x86-64 applications on ARM! Not that I'd try to run these games on a Switch (as article says, not enough muscle) but in the future when I get an ARM notebook, take Windows the hell off it and put Ubuntu or the like on it, I know at least I should be able to keep running my games if I want to. I did see recently, that several lines of tablet'y GPUs that a few years back supported like OpenGL ES 3.3 or whatever, Mesa now has full OpenGL and (fairly complete but still being added to) Vulkan support so they should be able to run DX9/10/11/12 games through dxvk and vkd3d (along with Linux-native games.) One vendor (don't recall if it was Qualcomm or Broadcom) specifically said now that their drivers are pretty feature-complete their specific near-term goal was to take in bug reports regarding any rendering artifacts, crashes or low performance on games and fix those bugs if any (well, I'm sure there won't be zero, but apparently it's in pretty good shape already.)