Switch 2 LCD vs OLED debate

[tp4tissue]

Online discussions have caught fire.

Haters are exclaiming, MONEY, Nintendoo wanted m0ar of it, was the lynchpin.



As the TP4 displayXpurt of gekha, allow Tp4 to explain the technical arguments they are not discussing.


LCD:

-Significantly lower powerdraw at equal brightness, a 450nit lcd uses way less power than 450 oled in bright colored games, which is most switch games.

- Slower pixel response, reduces perceived vrr flicker, especially at low fps transitions <60fps (which a switch has to do alot of)

- Slower pixel response, the added persistence blur actually reduces perceived judder in <60fps delivery

- Wide gamut, with much higher sustained brightness, technically, the LCD delivers a wider Bright-end gamut while shrinking the Dark-end gamut, as the backlight bloom eats the dark colors.

- They didn't mention if the lcd-type is,  pfs-phosphor or Quantum dot, Tp4 suspects it's probably not QD since that is a pretty penny saved in mass production which most people wouldn't notice.  The difference is only ~10-15% in gamut's total size.

OLED:

- GigaChad power draw. BAD FOR MOBILE DEVICE, At full field, on an all white screen, an LCD can push 500nits in the same power envelope as an OLED at 200nits.
  -- Even though most game situations are not full field white, LCDs are way more power efficient. The mid-band, where most games want to be at the ~200-300 nit level pixels, LCDs use way less power.

- Faster pixel response, faster "measured" response time, drawback? --> if FPS is lower than 60, it introduces more perceived Judder.  So input the same 45fps of a switch game, the LCD will look smoother in frame transition, than an Oled.  OLED will respond faster, but look more stuttery.

- Faster pixel response, at Higher fps, 100fps+, the OLED has motion clarity roughly double the refreshrate of the LCD, so a 100fps oled will look (in terms of motion clarity) as good as a 200hz lcd.    But, this is not going to happen often, if at all, on most Mobile titles.

- Gamut,  Oled has near perfect low range gamut and higher color-purity. LCD has significant light bleed, so even if you measure the same gamut, the color purity is lower, perceived saturation will be lower.

- Gamut, Oled has limited bright gamut due to power draw limitation, ABL.

- Viewing angle, Oled has much wider viewing angle that preserves off-axis color purity, whereas on LCD you get off-axis tint and black level lift and gamma drift.  This is important for larger screens, for smaller screens like the switch, you're always in the middle, and the FOV is pretty narrow, such that you don't need nearly as much off-axis performance. the edges will still look less color-pure/lifted, but it's not detrimental like on much larger LCDs TVs.

- Pixel lvl light control. No lifted blacks.

- VRR Flicker, the way oled refreshes, it will have power leakage, overshoot, at low refresh rates, leading to dark scene flickering. The lower the frame rate, the worse the transitions. So for mobile games, where FPS can dip quite alot, LCD is more stable.



Conclusion: 

Nintendo made the right call, in balancing the requirements of their "mobile" gaming product.  It's not that it HAS TO BE this way, but they are mass market.  Every tiny detail may represent a huge tail-end risk for their bottom line.

For example, they could use oled, if they just double the battery. But then it's going to be even m0ar chonky. If a 8yr old drops your chonker switch between their tiny hands, is that reasonable.

They could use micro-led backlight for local dimming, but no one is scaled large enough for them to produce enough units. At a time where capital investment is tight, not many factories can take a risk to scale up.

They can completely go to the walls, and triple the GPU power for sustained 120fps, triple the battery, and do OLED. but it would be $1000, in a FOR KIDS product category.

Poor people have to be able to buy this thing, they can squeeze $500 for video-games, but not $1000.  Nintendo isn't being ethical, they're just addressing the maximum market.

The Ethical debate would involve, no one should play video games, all free time should be utilized in planting trees and all rich people should be forced to do physical labor up to 25% as much as the poor.



Steam deck 2, though, it might be possible, PC gamers are much more OK with $1000 machines.

[noisyturtle]

The OLED Switch actually gets significantly more battery usage, improving the battery life from around 3-6 to a more respectable 5-9 over the OG model, and even more than the Switch Lite that gets like 4-7 and was supposed to be the more mobile version of the hardware.

It was 100% a price cutting measure, and I'm sure we will see some sort of improved screen version in a couple years.

[tp4tissue]

Incorrect comparison.

There are other changes they made apart from the oled screen itself.

OLED always use more power.   

If you're comparing 2 fixed systems, and the Oled lasts longer, it means the APL of the device is lower, which means ON AVERAGE, the net light output in that amount of time on the Oled is lower.


There are corner cases of course, where if the game is just dark.


The games may also themselves have OLED model specific tweaks. For power and to prevent burnin.