Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]

So I can only guess the reason why they didn't mention how much more powerful NS2 is compared to NS1, is because it is not that much more powerful?

I would guess only 30 to 50% more powerful

The leaks specs are [1]:

- ARM 8 Arm Cortex-A78C

- GPU: Nvidia T239 Ampere, 12 SM/1534 Cores

- 12 GB of ram.

Compared to Switch 1 [2]:

- ARM 4 Cortex-A57 cores @ 1.02 GHz

- GPU: NVIDIA Maxwell 256 cores

- 4 GB of ram.

It should like it should be a major boost in performance from those specs, like maybe 4x improvement overall?

Of course there are more pixels on this screen, so the amount of GPU per pixel may stay roughly the same.

[1] https://thegamepost.com/nintendo-switch-2-full-specs-appears... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch

If you believe the leakers [1]:

    Full specs:
    
    CPU: Arm Cortex-A78C
    8 cores
    Unknown L1/L2/L3 cache sizes
    GPU: Nvidia T239 Ampere
    1 Graphics Processing Cluster (GPC)
    12 Streaming Multiprocessors (SM)
    1534 CUDA cores
    6 Texture Processing Clusters (TPC)
    48 Gen 3 Tensor cores
    2 RTX ray-tracing cores
    RAM: 12 GB LPDDR5

    Handheld Mode:
    
    CPU: 998.4 MHz
    GPU: 561 MHz (~1.72 TFLOPS)
    Memory Frequency: 4266 MHz
    Memory Bandwidth: 68.256 GB/s

    Docked Mode:
    
    CPU: 1100.8 MHz
    GPU: 1007.25 MHz (~3.09 TFLOPS)
    Memory Frequency: 6400 MHz
    Memory Bandwidth: 102.4 GB/s

Switch 2 in comparison with the original Nintendo Switch:

    Category    Nintendo Switch 2    Nintendo Switch
    CUDA Cores  1536                 256
    Bus Width   128-bit              64-bit
    Memory Size 12 GB                4 GB
    Memory Type LPDDR5X              LPDDR4
    SM Count    12                   2
    Bandwidth   120 GB/s             25.6GB/s
    Dimensions  206 x 115 x 14       173 x 102 x 13.9
    (LWD mm)

[1] https://thegamepost.com/nintendo-switch-2-full-specs-appears...

Have they mentioned anything? All they have done so far is show the hardware off and one new game, which for the record does look more detailed than its predecessor.

This was just a hype video, they didn’t mention anything other than “2025” and the date of the Nintendo Direct with more information.

That said, I’m not expecting it to be a giant step up in performance.

How would that compare to other consoles, like the PS4/PS4 Pro?

I would guess much weaker, but IMO the switch's point is not raw performance but rather innovative gameplay and style

I’ve heard different leaks to the tune that it is actually significantly more powerful. Rationale being because Nintendo presumably finally needs to take 4k and higher frame rates seriously, and the hardware situation has improved enough for that to be possible under Nintendo’s philosophy (shit hardware with innovative and engaging gameplay). I mean their beloved launch title for the Switch had performance problems maintaining even 20fps at 720p. Pretty embarrassing.

No, it's because Nintendo prides itself to be about games, not about performance.

pc vs cell phone

GPU performance should be somewhere between PS4 and PS4 Pro. More memory is a good sign that Nintendo's machine will allow a larger software catalogue than that of the Xbox Series S, where 10 GB has been a severe impediment to porting.

Just based on teraflops it sits between a PS4 and a PS4 Pro.

But teraflops isn’t the whole picture though, it has other modern features like AI upscaling (DLSS) plus others.

For a portable it’s pretty nice.

The iPhone is faster than most PCs

Missing 4K is notable in the current Switch.

I think they've done something smart here by partnering with NVIDIA and given the success of the switch 1 they've probably built a good relationship.

So, although you're right, NVIDIA might be giving them a good performance/efficiency bespoke chip.

but quite different architectures

Maybe on short duration single threaded CPU benchmarks.

But its not true if you are talking about sustained gaming performance compared to an equally priced new PC. Even for $800 (entry level iPhone) a PC will be a much better performer for gaming.

The biggest problem is the memory bandwidth. PS4 memory bandwidth is 176 GB/s. These specs are quite bad, It's supposed to be Ampere based, so RTX 30 series. It was released in Sep 2020. That's over 4 years ago. Part of the problem with NVIDIA is that they have been milking their architectures.

For comparison, the Steamdeck was released in Feb 2022, and RDNA2 was released in Nov 2020. So the architecture gap was 1.5 years for Steamdeck, but 4.5 years for the Switch 2.

I guess there might be a chance that they enable DLSS4 for this device, but it's still sad to watch this unfold.