Windows 11 On Nintendo Switch? Possible, Albeit A Terrible Idea
Windows 11 On Nintendo Switch? Possible, Albeit A Terrible Idea
Most people certainly wouldn’t associate Nintendo’s popular Switch console with words like “powerful” or “performance”. The NVIDIA Tegra X1 chip that sits within the console is now almost 10 years old, and its performance is not even keeping up with most smartphones today. What if you tried to shove a full-blown Windows 11 operating system into it?
This rather ambitious attempt comes courtesy of @Patrosi73 on X (Twitter), involving the process of installing and attempting to perform basic tasks with Windows 11 on Arm, which is designed for Arm-based chips like the Tegra X1 SoC. Forget about performance as this entire process is anything but fast – the user claims it took him around 3 hours just to complete an install (a typical Windows 11 installation will take around 5-10 minutes), and every operation, like opening a menu, takes a whopping 10 seconds to respond.
The clip below demonstrates just how unresponsive Windows 11 was:
— PatRyk (@Patrosi73) May 12, 2024
As a bonus, here’s Peggle, a 2D game, running on the Nintendo Switch (running on Linux this time):
Barely pic.twitter.com/WWrXmYRXAb
— PatRyk (@Patrosi73) May 13, 2024
Of course, the staggeringly slow performance isn’t entirely the fault of the hardware. Nintendo Switch in its stock form is capable of running games like Doom Eternal at 30FPS (with the help of resolution scaling), but the sheer amount of system overhead introduced with a general-purpose operating system like Linux or even Windows 11 – which already is infamously slow on HDDs, let alone running on eMMCs found in the Switch – is just too much for the console to handle.
Source: Tom’s Hardware
Pokdepinion: That is painful to look at just how slow it ended up.
