In today's video you are going to see a Switch running Android a Switch running Linux a Switch running some benchmarks and some mobile games a Switch running PS2 and PS Vita titles and a Switch running Steam and PC games even God of War I mean, the 2018 PS4 title natively handled by Nintendo Switch! How crazy is that? Wondering how all those thing works? Keep watching and there's a lot of fun we gonna show you today Nintendo Switch is a pretty interesting charactor It might not have tons of performance as a console but it remains to be one of the most tweakable mod-friendly consoles on my list Not only does it have a superb homebrew community allows you to do game modding overclocking and other tricks in HorizonOS which is the OG system from Nintendo but you also have this ability to flash other OS according to your flavor including Android The whole OS swapping thing is called Switchroot project They recently released an update to Android 11 supporting all Switch models including the newer Lite and OLED models But bear in mind it is not like you can just grab a random Switch and do the tricks it need to be exploitable or hard-modded in order to try anything Thankfully there's tons of YouTube videos about Switch-modding and as I said before the community is strong and it's pretty easy to find everything you need including the most essencial part the bootloader "Hekate". I mean bootloader is the thing before we boot into OS this is where we tweak a lot of things including disk partition so we obviously have to get it done first From here it's actually pretty easy to install Android just download the image file and follow the tutorial on the switchroot website Hekate includes this Install Android button which make things much easier And since we wanna modify stuff and tweak around I also flashed TWRP the third party recovery and flashed magisk to gain root access of our android os Ok, then the Android 11 is up and running on the switch now Hmm it certainly feels pretty smooth just like any modern tablet you would imagine And thanks to the unique form factor of Switch it not only works like a tablet but if you're quirky like me you can even attach a keyboard and turn it into a laptop! Can I call that a Surface OLED? Kind of? well never mind I'm just having fun with it But a simple flashing is not enough we want to push the boundaries a bit further Because Nintendo Switch is definitely not the nicest dude when it comes to performance If you want to unleash all the potential of it on Android Overclocking is a must We can find the config files for Android right here under bootloader folder and all we need to do is add some commands here for oc By doing so my OLED model can push the CPU to run as high as 2.3GHz and the GPU up to 1267MHz As a comparison the og Nintendo setting operates the Tegra X1 CPU at only 1GHz and the GPU runs at 768MHz for dock (mode) and only 460MHz for handheld mode So clearly we're quite aggressive here But no need to be worried because first Switch has active cooling and second we're not actually overclocking this thing but rather bringing it back to its orginal form because it seems like the exact same chip in Shield TV also operates way more aggressive than the Switch spec So I think it's just Nintendo being too conservative But our oc journey is not stopping there We can also overclock the RAM The default 1600MHz RAM only provides about 26GB/s of bandwidth Remember Switch is using a Tegra chip which is an SoC with integrated graphics So even a small increase in memory speed can make a huge difference in graphics performance Let's add a ‘ram_oc’ command here and overclock this thing to 2133MHz which is the max number you can get under Android And I think after all these tweaking around It's time to put it to the test We did runs some benchmarks to see how Nintendo Switch performs against modern smartphones The sad news is the CPU part of this Tegra X1 chip seems extremely bad For Nintendo's original 1GHz spec what we got here is a multi-core performance even worse than a single-core performance of Snapdragon 4 Gen 1 a single core of today's low-end smartphone chip That just shows you how bad this CPU is After all it's already an 8-years old product and it is basically just 4 outdated A57 cores running at 20th Century clock speed Fortunately we did try to overclocking here and it just performs way better At 2.3GHz this Tegra X1 CPU almost doubles the performance nearly on par with a Snapdragon 821 maybe not the most modern pace but still acceptable considering where it cames from The GPU, on the other hand is quit impressive for an 8-years old veteran If we stick with the og handheld spec this GPU is quite close to a Snapdragon 845 Under dock mode it gets close to an 855 And if we overclock the GPU alone to 1267MHz it would be better than an 855 Combine that with an overclocked RAM we got ourself a graphic performance close to a Snapdragon 865 Bare in mind Tegra X1 is a 2015 chip... well maybe questionable since this is a 16nm revision not the og 20nm one But you get it I just feel pretty good when veteran ages well And it also shows you how the bottleneck of Switch is usually the memory bandwidth The GPU runs 10% faster by just overclocking RAM that is quite unusual to see Considering its ancient CPU performance and quite limited bandwidth I just wanna take a moment to appreciate all the real heroes the game developers on Switch especially those cross-platform third-party games I just couldn't imagine how challenging it is to port those PC and console tripple-A titles to Switch Definitely did some crazy works Alright since we have Android installed maybe we can try some weird things that the Switch can only dream of like playing mobile games We tried Genshin Impact on Switch it kinda works I mean we do get into the game But it's definetely not working well Just look at those janks and stutters you can't even take a break with those framedrops The GPU actually have enough power to run over 30fps like here when we stop moving but those stutters from an overloaded CPU is just unbearable That is also why lowering down graphic settings won't really help the framerate The interest thing is Genshin Impact actually announced a Switch version back then when it first launched They even droped a trailer on YouTube but they never release the game And I kinda see why here tons of works have to be done before it can really take shape And the GPU-favoured Switch hardware is just not suitable for a CPU bound game like Genshin Impact We tried another mobile title Honkai: Star Rail Normally for smartphone this game is even more demanding than Genshin Impact But it actually runs way better on Switch We're getting 30 to 40 FPS under medium setting even in some most demanding scenes And lowering graphic settings actually works getting us over 50 FPS Because this is typically a GPU bound game which really suits the Switch hardware If you think playing mobile games on Switch isn't crazy enough well no need to rush we're just getting started Let’s try PlayStation 2 emulation on Switch How about this? Playing Gran Turismo 4 on Switch! Well not exactly playing because the CPU of Switch is still a bit weak to handle such a demanding PS2 title at full speed Still this is already the pinnacle of PS2 so Switch should be fine with those less demanding games Another interesting emulator we tried is Vita3K a PS Vita emulator Fascinating, right? I never thought about it before trying But I have to say playing Vita games on Switch doesn't feel weird at all They do have pretty similar form factor However the Vita3K emulator is still in early stages of development You'll graphical issues and bugs in larger games I definitely won't consider that playable for now But still the performance seems quite decent showing us some real promise Speaking of which Yuzu has also released an Android version So we got this weird question of... can Switch emulate Switch? Ha I've been itching to try this for a while Unfortunately Yuzu's GPU compatibility on Android isn't up to scratch At least it's not working with this Tegra X1 yet Well, that's not surprising Becasue you know Emulating Switch on a Switch no one see that coming huh? And you know what? We're not stopping here yet I got another interesting game to show you which is, Half-Life 2! A couple of years ago Nvidia has ported several PC games to Android for the Tegra platform serving their Shield products These games are Nvidia exclusives on Android While majority of them actually received a Switch port a few of them didn't That includes Half-Life 2 We got into the game pretty easily and it runs surprisingly smooth Since the game allow you to reassign controller layout the joysticks works just fine here Performance wise It mostly keeps a 60 frames per second with frame drops in complex scenes That's actually quite decent gaming experience And I just hope Half-Life 2 can find its way to an official release on Switch I think it's totally viable While Android on Switch does provides us some entertainment here the main course is yet to come Let me introduce Linux on Switch! This is even more exciting than Android We can flash the L4T Ubuntu onto the Switch Then through days of relentless tinkering we can even run PC games I mean tripple-A PC games on Switch! Sounds impressive, right? But how can a Switch a Linux device with an ARM chip run Windows PC games? That does not make any sense Well the secret lies in a few essential tools we used here Wine, Box64, and DXVK If you are a Linux enthusiast you must be familiar with Wine It's a translation layer that allows you to call Windows API on Linux and MacOS Both the Proton on SteamDeck and the recently released game porting toolkit for MacOS are kinda based on Wine Simply speaking Wine is here to help us building a Windows-like environment Another teammate is Box64 a very interesting tool that translates x86 instructions for ARM with a 32-bit version called Box86 You might think this translation can be bad for performance but Box86 and Box64 have developed to be highly efficient over the years allowing us to run x86 applications smoothly on the ARM platform And the final piece of puzzle is DXVK which, as the name implies translates DirectX graphics interfaces into Vulkan enabling us to run these games under Linux actually SteamDeck uses DXVK as well and that definitely looks pretty decent with very little performance loss However using all these translation layers together feels a bit outlaw and I'm not surprised if anyone gets concerning here Let's just start tinkering and see Honestly this tinkering process is quite tricky Installing Linux is easy enough with detailed steps provided on the Switchroot website Like Android once you've partitioned the SD card and copied the files just one-click in Hekate is all you need And after a quick setup we now have this L4T-based Ubuntu 18.04 system on our Switch To make things easier I've plugged a keyboard and mouse into the Switch which looks a bit quirky hmm... never mind The first thing I am gonna do here is still overclocking I mean that's what the channel is all about, right? Again just modify the config file like we did for Android The good news is there's no limit for RAM overclocking under Linux unlike previously on Android we can even increase the memory voltage for further overclocking My Switch can go up to 2500MHz which significantly improves performance After that I installed Jetson Stats to monitor our hardware I can use jtop command to bring it up It's kinda like a task manager In the Linux we've already turned on the high-performance mode here and by another command called 'jetson_clocks' , we can force the Tegra chip to work at its highest clock speed and maxing out the fan So, as you can see it now locked the CPU to the maximum 2.3GHz GPU over 1200MHz and the RAM goes up to 2500MHz I've already did some stress test to see if it works you know just in case it crashes into eternity I have to say tweaking with performance is actually the easiest part because now we're gonna go through the tough stuff I mean, the deployment process First we need to deploy Box64 and Wine under Linux set up Wine a bit and with these two in place we can already run Windows software Let's try to run Cinebench R15 a CPU rendering benchmark to see how this CPU performs under translation Well the rendering experience is quite painful to say the least Definitely keeps us waiting for a while and finally we've got a multi-core score of 83 To give you some clues this double-digit result is even worse than some ten years old chromebook The A57 is weak to begin with and adding translation layers on that it's no surprise it can't perform well To be honest with such minimal CPU performance I'm kinda worried about the upcoming gaming stuff So now we got Box64 and Wine the last thing we need for gaming is DXVK But before that I need to upgrade the JetPack which is Nvidia's driver on this Switch The L4T OS from Switchroot project only supports driver version 32.3 by default which only allows us to use Vulkan 1.1 makes it impossible to run a lot of PC games In theory Tegra X1 can upgrade to 32.7 driver enabling Vulkan 1.2 but due to numerous bugs and performance issues with this version the developers of Switchroot decided to disabled this upgrade in the preference file Since upgrading to Vulkan 1.2 is critical for DXVK it kinda leaves us no choice but to join the rebelion and break the seal After upgrading the NVIDIA driver we finally have Vulkan 1.2 support and now we can install DXVK However we still can't use the latest 2.2 version as it requires Vulkan 1.3 support which we can never get on Tegra X1 so we gonna use an older version here After that we still need to use a tool called Winetricks to configure the runtime environment for Wine As we all know gaming on Windows inevitably involves dependencies I mean remember those DLL files right? Running games with Wine also requires these things And after that the last thing we need to do is increase the virtual RAM or let's say, swap file on Linux Nintendo Switch only has 4GB of RAM which is not nearly enough for PC games To at least get the bigger games to run we have to allocate more than 8GB of swap file Like I'm doing here Fun fact new games might perform better than older ones on this Linux Switch Because the Linux for Tegra X1 doesn't support 32-bit drivers; it's a pure 64-bit platform We can directly access the GPU under Box64 running 64-bit games But for older 32-bit games we must use Box86 which has to take a roundabout with mesa+virgl solutions making our days much harder But anyway I still installed Box86 here for Steam And I must admit it's a lot more complicated than installing Box64 You have to set up an isolated environment and install it using schroot I think you might not wanna get into that for sure Uhhh, finally! finally go through all the sh*t on Linux It definitely doesn't sound easy but if you wanna see the glory you gonna pay the price Now it's time to enjoy everything So first Let's try to run Steam And, it actually runs! Wow we've successfully run the Steam client on Nintendo Switch we can even enter the Big Picture Mode! And look at that! A Nintendo Steam Deck Never thought about it right? How crazy is that! Apart from the pretty mindblowing idea we do have some real problems As you can see Steam consumes a lot of resources in the background making games quite unplayable with Steam running So, we have to compromise try not to use Steam as much as possible The first game we gonna try here maybe we should start with a relatively easy one like Titanfall 2! Well saying it's easy is still pretty... you know exaggerated it's a proper PC triple A title For the poor CPU of the Switch I would say it's just a miracle to run any game at all Let's see if Titanfall 2 works on Switch Well, not a bad start it indeed loads into the game! Wow this main menu is pretty smooth it seems... it might actually works! Allright the loading is incredibly slow and we have to wait like a century but eventually hard work pays off And we entered the game Hey, it seems pretty okay we got 30-ish fps at 720p medium quality not bad... ah... okay that was just the opening scene In actual gameplay it's not that good you know the frame rate drops occasionally but most of the time it's over 20 frames kinda... playable? Unfortunately this game has audio issues Unfortunately this game has audio issues making the sound a bit choppy But hey, if you mute the audio it does sort of... work I mean the framerate feels fine considering everything at least I can play through the campaign So, mission accomplished, right? I gonna say with a not-so-powerful hardware and so many translation layers involved this performance is already beyond my expectation and it is time to upgrade the challenge Let's try something even bigger like, Grand Theft Auto V! Wow, running GTA5 on Switch that's pretty wild right? And you know what? It actually works! 720P, normal setting the Switch is now running GTA5 although the framerate is nowhere close to the Titanfall 2 level We can only get double digit even single digit here I would consider this unplayable but I do understand such a huge open-world game like GTA5 is just too much for the CPU It's infamously taxing harsh on I/O The fact that we can get into the game is already quite fascinating While GTA5 seems quite hard to swallow we can definitely try other PC games with... let's say more healthy appetite For example, Devil May Cry 5! This is another modern tripple-A game developed by Capcom using the RE engine it is known for stunning graphics and friendly to many PC hardware But what about Switch? Let's find the answer just now And we successfully entered the main menu it looks pretty hopeful quite smooth I'll set the graphic to 720p low quality and start the game I am gonna tell you the cutscene looks really decent reaching 20-ish FPS When we are actually controlling the character it run around maybe 15-ish well... not the worst performance you would imagine Although the framerate isn't quite enough it does feel consistant unlike GTA5 And the funny thing is the game kinda runs like bullet time enabled so it is sort of playable just in a very slow way Considering the calibre of the game it's still amazing to see it works But hey remember we're running at 720P, right? I kinda wonder if it's possible to make it smoother by cutting down the resolution? And it seems impossible 50% pixels same framerate For me, this is expected Because if we look at the jtop here you can see the quad-core A57 CPUs are almost exploding It's a massive CPU bottleneck here So no matter how much you drop the graphics setting you just can't break through the limit Personally I think with some decent optimizations here and there it is possible to bring a DMC5 port to Switch Alright looks like it's time to try the ultimate challenge God of War! A Sony-franchise PlayStation 4 title on Switch that is some weird feeling Hmm as you can see the Sony intro pops out it's definitely a good sign And it is trying very hard to load.. and load, and load and, we did it! We're in the game now! Holy crap we're running God of War on a Switch now! Unbelievable! Although the frame rate we got doesn't seem very healthy but anyway it does run without graphic issues? Let's look at the settings here 720p 50% rendering scale Really? This is a Nintendo Steam Deck boy Come on, pull it up We're not afraid of extra pixels, right? You see that? It's still the same framerate Well, let's play through a bit I must admit the graphics is just stunning here definitely the PS4 level you would expect oh, the frame pace is pretty bad You can really feel the stutters every few seconds which is as expected I would say But, it’s definitely running Just look at me now operating Kratos that is not something usual to see on a Nintendo Switch huh? Even though we're getting less than 10 FPS the fact that we can even run God of War on the Switch is already something I would say after tons of time we spend on making thing works on Linux it is just so satisfy to see the game actually running And since we're using Linux not only can you run some tripple-A titles on Switch but you can basically run anything Like if you wanna play things you won't even imagine on Switch like 3D Pinball or Minesweeper you can do it! Or if you wanna try those "Not Suitable For Nintendo"... Hmm, well you're free to do that too I mean, you're on Linux so you're the God Well today we definitely came from a long way behind and my Switch, I can assure you he's now the happy kid after traveling around the world So, what's the point? It's not like a super easy thing to do And if I wanna play PC games I can just play on PC why bother doing that on a Nintendo Switch? Well, I honestly don't know And I probably won't really choose to play those games here But the thing is I do recieve a lot of fun! Not the fun of gaming but the fun of breaking the rules the fun of doing impossible For enthusiasts like me the joy from tweaking hardware and software the joy from modding the joy from seeing God of War running on the Switch it's never less satisfying than beating the game itself So if you're watching and getting interest of those things just feel free to join the adventure not paticularly about Switch but anything Anything you have a interest in just have fun tweak around with it After all being a tech nerd is all about having fun Thanks for watching and if you like this video please, hit the like button subscribe to our channel I'm your fellow Fei this is Geekerwan and see you next time
