Nintendo’s remake arrives November 5, two weeks before GTA VI, on a console with under a third of the PS5’s GPU power. Design may still beat specs.
Competition between major titles is becoming a theme as we move toward the end of the year. On December 18, two massive films, Dune: Part Three and Avengers: Doomsday, hit movie theaters on the same day, in a move that the industry cannot decide is brave or borderline suicidal. The clash has already been dubbed Dunesday. And this month, two of the biggest video games of the year, Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto VI (GTA VI), launch a mere two weeks apart.
Beyond the wild difference in content (this is more Barbenheimer than Dunesday), what makes their story particularly interesting is that they launch on hardware at opposite ends of the power scale. And it is the cheaper machine that might be the one making the stronger case for how games should be built in an industry squeezed by rising memory costs and console prices.
We’ve been here before. When Tears of the Kingdom arrived, we looked at how Nintendo turned an underpowered Switch into a platform for one of the biggest releases of all time. Now Ocarina of Time arrives on the Switch 2, which is still underpowered against the machines around it, and that still doesn’t matter.
Nintendo has not published official GPU specs for the Switch 2, but third-party analysis puts it at roughly 3.07 TFLOPS docked and 1.71 handheld, with 12 GB of LPDDR5X memory. By way of comparison, the PS5 offers 10.28 TFLOPS and 16 GB of GDDR6, while the PS5 Pro goes considerably further. In raw GPU terms, the Switch 2 has less than a third of what the base-spec PS5 brings.
That gap matters for a game such as GTA VI, which is built around a vast, dense open world that aims for photorealism. It is hard to imagine it running on Nintendo’s hardware, and Rockstar has unsurprisingly announced nothing of the kind, though it has ported games to Nintendo consoles in the past. (The most recent was Red Dead Redemption on the Switch 2 in December 2025, and Red Dead Redemption 2 is rumored to be on the way, but Rockstar has confirmed nothing.)
But Nintendo designs its games around a different set of choices. With the Hyrule of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, it created a huge world and filled it with deliberately stylized graphics that eschewed photorealism for scale and interactivity.
With Ocarina of Time it’s made a different set of choices again. Previews note that Hyrule Field, which keeps the bounded layout of the 1998 original, feels small next to the Breath of the Wild map that Tears of the Kingdom reuses and expands. Whether that is a deliberate trade for polish or simply keeping true to the original, Nintendo hasn’t said (and, of course, the finished product may have a bigger play area). But the remake’s detail is where preview writers seem to be focusing their praise. We should know more soon: Metacritic has pointed to midweek for the review embargo lifting, which could mean Wednesday.
Nintendo has not published a resolution figure for the Ocarina of Time remake, though reports based on its pre-release details list 60 fps. Digital Foundry’s analysis of the September Direct footage found gameplay at native 1080p and 60 fps, with menus at 1440p and no sign of DLSS upscaling (though it did point out some areas where it might actually have helped). That frame rate, though, is about three times that of the N64 original, which ran at roughly 20 fps.
GTA VI will be massive, no doubt about it. But Nintendo seems once more to have pulled off the trick of creating something special on a console that is comparatively feeble next to its rivals. When Tears of the Kingdom came out, we made the argument that you can chase specs as much as you like; it’s the content that really counts. And that is as true today as it was then, not to mention being as appicable to cameras as ever.