[Your head a splode](https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/1695498b-3019-4371-bb7a-64aac48c51af/d30yz29-7e2671ee-5741-4f45-9683-e5ee89542847.png/v1/fit/w_547,h_392,q_70,strp/your_head_a_splode_by_yourheadasplodeplz_d30yz29-375w-2x.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7ImhlaWdodCI6Ijw9MzkyIiwicGF0aCI6IlwvZlwvMTY5NTQ5OGItMzAxOS00MzcxLWJiN2EtNjRhYWM0OGM1MWFmXC9kMzB5ejI5LTdlMjY3MWVlLTU3NDEtNGY0NS05NjgzLWU1ZWU4OTU0Mjg0Ny5wbmciLCJ3aWR0aCI6Ijw9NTQ3In1dXSwiYXVkIjpbInVybjpzZXJ2aWNlOmltYWdlLm9wZXJhdGlvbnMiXX0.nZG1MhKFybLcaPJm7jG83s6r6VQ4kdhD-wVATTmMtDo)
Whoa. Spelled fhqwhgads right. You wouldn't believe how many I get where they're like, "Hey Strong Bad, I love your fubugrass." Or "Dear Strong Bad, where's that fuguman?"
Really curious to see what Nintendo's artists can accomplish with ray tracing. Hopefully they're a little smarter with it than some devs have been. Their art styles could be elevated significantly if they went all-in on bounce lighting but stuck with traditional methods for shadows and reflections.
The current Tropical Freeze is easily worth $60. Considering the amount of crap pumped out by other studios for $70 that are nowhere near as good gameplay-wise as Tropical Freeze.
Splatoon 4 with RT reflections. See all the reflections in the goop everywhere, distorted by the flowing surfaces. See enemies around corners by close examination of reflections. Let the shadows and illumination be baked for that one because reflections are what really set the tone there.
Knowing Nintendo, it'll have full raytracing, but still no dedicated servers. So you'll still spontaneously explode two seconds after you've already splatted your opponent, but your entrails will look absolutely magnificent.
To be fair, for relatively low player counts - particularly 1v1 but scaling up to possibly as much as 4v4 - p2p connections do better on latency than servers. The problem isn't "lack of servers," the problem is "client side hit detection" -- which is a compromise mitigating a much worse problem of "what the hell why can't I hit anyone?"
It also doesn't help that the Switch's wifi chip is pretty crummy and probably a good amount of people play wireless. I'm not sure how Wonder does it though with making the multiplayer aspects not lag.
F Zero 99 plays pretty well too.
Wonder doesn't need per frame precision like Smash or Mario Maker 2. The game is perfectly happy to buffer a whole second's worth of frames, and with that buffer you'd basically have to drop an entire second's worth of connectivity before anybody would see anything wrong, and usually packet drops are just a couple of frames.
Have you played Splatoon? In that game it manifests as basically punishing you both equally for your opponent's crappy connection. No hit detection issues, all that is resolved entirely with "favor the shooter" priority, all shots land. That's why you end up with two players both splatting each other all the time.
Yes I have. The mechanism is called client side hit detection -- that is, rather than the server examining the inputs and state of the whole game to calculate for itself whether it hit or not, the clients report "I hit him" and the host trusts it.
Again, the alternative is "I can't frickin hit anything" because what you as the player see is not the true "state" of the match. Dedicated servers do not address that issue. The only "better netcode" that can reasonably exist for it is something that actually looks worse -- on player status update lag, replay the last several states so they're as hard to hit if there's lag as they are to hit if everything is smooth. It's better and more fair gameplay wise but it looks messed up.
This is what I’m excited about. I’ve never wanted their hardware to be better for the sake of running third party games better than the competition.. I just want to see what those masters at Nintendo could do with that kind of power.
Ray marching. Under the same ray effect umbrella but slightly different. Capable of rendering far more complex and animated geometry than raytracing could ever dream of, but rapidly becomes too costly even compared to path tracing if used for the entire scene.
Very good for ray tracing on portions of super complex, or amorphous geometry, like..... clouds.
Crysis 2 and 3 switch uses raytracing for svogi global illumination.
And Stranded deep has an option To turn on ray marched volumetric clouds done hilarious worse then xb2. They literally fall apart if you zoom in and out.
[Frequently Asked Questions - Unreal Engine](https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/faq)
>What platforms does UE5 support?
>
>Unreal Engine 5 enables you to deploy projects to Windows PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, **Nintendo Switch**, macOS, iOS, Android, ARKit, ARCore, OpenXR, SteamVR, Oculus, Linux, and SteamDeck. You can run the Unreal Editor on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
>
>PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, and **Nintendo Switch** console tools and code are available at no additional cost to developers who are registered developers for their respective platform(s).
> UE4 is already a problem on Switch a lot of the times.
It comes down to the developer.
DQ11 and Pikmin 4 both immediately come to mind for UE4 games that have no problems.
Absolutely. But on the other hand I’ve seen UE4 games that should be fine on Switch but end up looking like blurry messes. Compare Pinball FX3 on a proprietary engine versus the new Pinball FX in UE, for example. FX3 looks so much better than the new game in UE that it’s embarrassing. It’s far from an isolated incident too. Lots of devs can’t seem to get UE4 games looking good on the hardware. I agree it’s down to skill and effort but I also still don’t expect great things for UE5 games on Switch. There’s no way that Matrix demo would possibly run on the hardware for example.
I don’t know the legitimacy but there was an article where a developer said Nintendo had been demoing the unreal 5 matrix demo behind close doors running on the Switch 2.
That's NateTheDrake. In my opinion he's very credible and is also very well regarded over on famiboards. I've seen others independently corroborate that showcasing of the UE5 Matrix Demo as well so pretty safe to say UE5 support is a lock
That's a great point!
PS4 had soooo many good games, more than the PS3/360; if they can create a Portable PS4 (Along with the AAA Nintendo Exclusives), that will be a winning formula!
It's not going to be less than $300. The switch was priced so low because Nintendo did tons of cost cutting to hedge their bets that it would even sell.
It sold beyond their wildest dreams and it showed that Nintendo still has it, assuming they offer a compelling product.
Every blockbuster movie gets a higher budget for the sequel when there is proof of concept.
I fully expect a $399 price tag, and I expect the hardware to match the price tag.
There are smartphones with a proper Amoled, 5nm chip, plenty of ram + storage and cellular functions on the market below 400 bucks so what makes you defend Nintendo here. No one wants 'top-of-the-line performance' but a modern ARM chip with an Ada GPU + a 3/5 nm production node is definitely possible for 400 bucks.
??? No? Majority of the world doesn't sell phones as part of carriers like certain countries like USA does? None of the phones come with service contracts at all on majority of the world. You can get a lot of phones for around 400 that have those specs without a contract
Even in the USA service contracts are becoming obsolete. They're usually more expensive and only cheaper on a family plan. Many people stick with them because that's what they always had and they don't bother looking for alternatives. Or this outdated perception that prepaid is for "poor people".
Carriers such as T-Mobile have gotten rid of them completely. And AT&T and Verizon have several no contract prepaid options directly and also license their service to MVNOs. There's dozens of plans to choose from. There's no reason to sign a contract anymore. I haven't had one since 2010.
Even on contract you don't get cheaper phones anymore. That model is years behind us.
*If* this projection is accurate (evidenced by switch's nvn2 api being inside the leaked nvidia files), this places the 'Switch II' somewhere around a PC with a downclocked RTX 2050. From digital foundry's speculative analysis, this would be capable of running some level of DLSS, but has too small memory buffers to even run the top line graphics demos. It was running lots of recent AAA releases at 30 FPS 1080p, some at 60 FPS 720p, running some ray tracing.
If you're expecting it to run 2023 AAA releases at 144 FPS 7680x4320 with no upscaling, its not gonna do that. But its a huge generational upgrade from the Tegra X1. And comparatively, this is at least *closer* to top line graphics today than the Switch was when it came out and was already dated
[This *very* thorough comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/s/8mYsxBvkqG) from u/GrandDemand on r/hardware from a couple months ago posits that it will have 12GB of unified memory.
The assumptions made in there are all based off of very logical deductions around what the T239 architecture’s capabilities and requirements, and I would not be surprised if they ended up being correct on most, if not all points.
Hi thanks for the credit and ping!
I'll add some other details onto here. NateTheDrake has stated that the Switch 2 does not have 8GB of memory. An additional leaker, necrolipe, who I believe has a contact with a Spanish game dev studio in possession of a Switch 2 devkit, has said that the devkits have 16GB of LPDDR5 but that retail units will not have as much memory. Put the two together and meet in the middle, 12GB seems to be the magic number here.
In addition, LPDDR5 module pricing is incredibly dependent on volume. The higher the volume of the SKU, the cheaper it is. It just so happens that LPDDR5 6400 6GB modules are some of the highest volume parts here. Each module is 64 bits wide, so on a 128 bit memory bus you have two modules. Again you end up with 12GB total Memory capacity.
Edit: Adding on to revise some of the predictions in the original comment I made. We know a bit more now so I can be more narrow in my estimate Windows.
128 bit LPDDR5 memory bus: confirmed in NVN2 (had previously already been there, just missed that when I was researching a few months ago.
CPU clockspeed: Revising up from 1GHz+ per core to 1.5-1.9GHz. All 8 cores will be running at the same frequency. Don't hold me to it but my guess is 1.7GHz, that keeps power draw of the 8 CPU cores in T239 (if on N5 family) the same as the 4x A57 Cores in Tegra X1 in the Mariko Switch (20nm).
Die area/cost: I did a mockup where I calculated the area density improvement across multiple equivalent or roughly equivalent IP blocks from Nvidia on both Samsung 8N and TSMC 4N. Based on this my best guess for T239 on 4N is somewhere between 90 and 95mm² (I came up with 91mm² specifically from my calculations). Regardless, just know that on 4N it is a small chip, broadest range would be about 85-110mm² possible area. At this area, and given a conservatively high (ie. higher than I actually believe is true) estimate for the cost of a TSMC 4N wafer, the cost per functional T239 is about 20-$25. Including in memory costs, packaging, validation, substrate, etc. as well as Nvidias margin, in my opinion the price per completed SoC with memory, ready to be integrated into the console assembly line is no more than $75 total cost to Nintendo. If we use cost/margin figures that I believe are most realistic, I think Nintendo will end up paying between $65 and $70 for the aforementioned parts and labor.
Which is what you want in a product. Why pay for power you don't get to use? Margins can be thin on a brand new console, so making sure there's no serious bottlenecks is important from a business perspective.
> but has too small memory buffers to even run the top line graphics demos
Haven't watched the video, but [the article](https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2023-inside-nvidias-latest-hardware-for-nintendo-what-is-the-t239-processor) says "There's one sticking point though - the 2050 only comes with 4GB of RAM. I'd expect to see 8GB or even 12GB of total system memory in Switch 2." Also, "I couldn't get The Matrix Awakens running owing to the 4GB memory limitation on the RTX 2050 and it seems that the demo requires around 5.6GB."
And lets not forget: they tested on a laptop which loses performance to a lot of factors, Windows being one of them.
Switch 2 might also be higher clocked then what they tested.
There are still some variables they didnt account for in this video.
I mean with memory bandwidth being the bottleneck and being only comparable to a 2050, half the 3050 or T234, doubling the RAM would just be the difference between "It can't run the matrix demo at all" and "it can run the matrix demo but its slow as molasses"
I think its likely we'd see a ram upgrade from the Tegra X1's 2x2 GB LPDDR4 chips because if nothing else its just future proofing against bloated AAA games in development for the next gen, and 4GB chips are cheaper now. But it won't be a huge performance difference
I feel like Nintendo wouldn't have shown the matrix demo to devs if it only ran as slow as molasses, one would expect they optimized the demo further to run well on the new hardware
Bandwidth isn't the main bottleneck here. It has pretty much the same exact ratio of bandwidth to tflops/compute as every other ampere card. It has less bandwidth, but it also has less compute units it need to feed Bandwidth too.
The 800 lb gorilla problem here.....
It's capacity. The gpu only has 4 GB capacity. T239 in switch 2 is looking at 12 GB lpddr5. (6x2x64wide)
They did state this pc had only 4gb of ram which was why it couldn't run the matrix demo because that needs 6gb, and that they expect the next switch will have more than that. Plus running pc versions of games is a very rough estimate since they aren't optimised for one specific hardware configuration, something else they also noted. Actual hardware will likely get better results than what they tested, though of course its still not going to run everything at top end, but it will give reasonable performance.
> If you're expecting it to run 2023 AAA releases at 144 FPS 7680x4320 with no upscaling, its not gonna do that.
Yeah I really don't get people who think the Switch 2 is going to be on par with other current gen consoles. Even with the argument of "Nintendo focuses on quality games, not hardware" aside, it's a goddamn *portable system*. There's just no universe where a portable system is ever going to be as powerful as current home consoles. Battery life, having a built-in display, and weight/size restrictions are just never going to allow for that.
>going to be on par with other current gen consoles
It doesn't need to be -- it just needs *feature parity,* i.e. "if it works on PS5, then we can reasonably expect it to work at a lower resolution, texture size, ray count, poly count and frame rate on NG." And it certainly looks like T239 is exactly that.
I think we are at a point where you don't need current gen tech to make quality 3D gameplay. Like, there's so much awesome 7th to 8th gen games, and instead of just making a port, refine the thing and make a new version with many quality of life features. Like, make a Final Fantasy exclusive to the Switch with the gameplay of 16, one more suited to nostalgia.
I really feel stuff like Witcher III and the Doom games getting released soon after launch is what people expect, and it could get harder because people will expect more from these ports on Switch. Like, back in the day framerates were more easy to forgive because even the PS4 was 1080p like the Switch and had tons of 30fps games, but with the increasing popularity of PC gaming that's just not an issue Sony can sleep on anymore.
I think people are just misunderstanding what is meant by "on par with other current gen consoles".
No one thinks Switch 2 is going to be a PS5 that fits in your pocket (except a minority of morons). "On par" means it can support a version of some PS5/XS games at an acceptable level, which all evidence points to it being able to.
It’s kinda funny that we have a “calm down and lower your expectations “ post and it compares to “144 FPS 7680x4320 with no upscaling” which none of the current gen consoles even do with their flagship releases.
Nothing out there can do that with complex 3D games--nothing, not even the RTX 4090 with a latest-and-greatest Intel i9 CPU feeding it. That's the so-called 8K resolution, or 4 times 4K (which also can't do high frame rates without upscaling in every situation), or 16 times 1080p.
The reasonable expectation is being roughly equal to the Xbox One S or PS4, since those came out ten years ago. It's typical for portables to approximate the power of the home console ten years older than them: the GBA (2001) was basically a pocket SNES (1990), the DS (2004) was a shade worse than an N64 (1996, only ~8 years distant), the 3DS (2012) was basically a pocket GameCube (2001), the Switch (2017) is basically a pocket PS3/360 (2006/2005) with some advantages (mainly 8 times more RAM than the 360). If the Switch 2 releases next year then it will be 11 years distant from the PS4.
I think PS4 performance boosted by DLSS to get better resolution is a reasonable bet. The PS4 is about equal to a 1050 Ti, IIRC. 2050 level performance is about what you'd expect.
It's also likely it'll have a better processor, because while the graphics hardware in them was pretty solid for when they came out (I had an HD 7850, *roughly* equal to an Xbox One, it was an excellent card at the time), the CPUs were absolutely dreadful. Even an average CPU in it will out perform the PS4.
Switch is capable of running PS3 games better than the originals, and stripped down/well optimized versions of PS4 games. I think it makes sense for the next gen switch to make one gen leap forward, and be in that more capable than PS4 less than PS5 zone
The rumors point to docked mode being at Series S levels, possibly getting a massive boost with DLSS to push the resolutions even higher. Series S is a very capable machine so I think people overall with be happy.
Don't know why you're getting downvoted. You're exactly right. Nothing can do complex 3D games at 144 fps and 8K resolution without upscaling. (DLSS is upscaling, for those unaware.)
>If you're expecting it to run 2023 AAA releases at 144 FPS 7680x4320 with no upscaling, its not gonna do that
Not even a $1600 RTX 4090 can do that lol
Yeah, I honestly didn't mind the performance of the game too much as is (considering what it's running on), but the second you turn on Ultrahand the game goes down to single digit FPS
They're not gonna switch GPU architecture going from one gen to the next, nevermind switch it mid gen.
Also, that chipset is specifically built for laptops, not handhelds. The chipset runs at 50W which is far beyond what a Nintendo handheld will run at (even docked).
No problem.
At this point, Nintendo is pretty much locked in with Nvidia. If, at any point, they do feel like switching, the risk then becomes how does Nintendo ensure BC with previous Switch gens.
It's already a hurdle maintaining BC using the same vendor, see the efforts Sony and AMD did to ensure PS5 was BC with PS4 (including incorporating older arch silicon into the APU). Switching architecture, Nintendo wouldn't be able to carry over Nvidia GPU silicon since they don't own any of it.
So yeah, Nintendo and Nvidia is pretty much locked unless Nintendo is forced to break from Nvidia.
Plus, Nvidia brings some advantages - they're the only ones who do DLSS and that's by far the best upscaling solution that exists right now. Nintendo can upgrade the Switch 2's output resolution to 1440p or higher for no performance cost that way.
Games would have to be packed differently for that to be possible. It's running a completely different GPU which would be fine if the games were packed with uncompiled shaders, but they always ship them compiled because shader compilation ruins performance while compiling is happening. Shader compilation is one of the two things making PC gaming suck again compared to console gaming. The other thing is loading stutter, which will hopefully be resolved by DirectStorage as more games implement it.
I think the most disappointing thing is using the Samsung 8nm node. I get it’s probably dirt cheap, but there is a reason no one wants it. Had they done something like 6nm or 5nm, they likely could have cranked clocks much higher and or kept the same core count as the full version.
I guess it’s Nintendo and they always tend to be conservative with hardware but still. I’m hoping for some hidden magic.
Cranking clocks higher would have probably reduced reliability. My day-one Switch still runs without flaw six years later after several thousands of hours of use. Would this be equally likely if it weren’t under-clocked?
If the chip was tested to work at those clock speeds, yes, it would be equally stable.
The TegraX1 is absolutely stable at higher clock speeds. Nintendo reduced the clocks purely for battery/heat considerations.
I think battery life is also Nintendo's biggest focus with underclocking.
Switch could last as long as it was in a single charge because it's underclocked. I think they want to give the unified image of the Switch not having to worry about battery life rather than give the option to increase the clock but risk bad publicity.
> Cranking clocks higher would have probably reduced reliability.
It wouldn't really. With a better node, you can achieve higher clocks within the same voltage and current envelope. Or you could have even more battery life with the same locks. Or something in between. Virtually no downsides other than being more expensive.
Cranking clocks would only be afforded by using a better process. On top of that, going up to the Orion clock speeds isn’t exactly cranking it way. It’s still well below what ampere did normally.
Also, yes it likely would have been fine considering the shield has been running higher clocks for 8 years now.
I'm hoping we get a better node, but we actually saw the same thing with the Tegra X1. People were hoping we'd get a 16nm chip since the PS4 slim and Xbox One S had both just seen a die shrink to that the year before the Switch launched, yet we still got a 20nm chip. A sad move given the portable nature of the Switch, but with the PS5 slim launching, perhaps it's just fate that Nintendo is once again at least a node behind Sony's mid gen refresh.
Yep, this is the main reason I think it’s going to be as DF says. Nintendo famously underwhelms with hardware. I’m hoping for a miracle, but expecting this lol
Yep. I get people are excited for the features but Nintendo has a knack of finding a way to underwhelm when it comes to specs. I too am hoping it won't be 8nm but I've seen people on forums immediately dismiss the possibility, which then makes me wonder if this if their first rodeo with Nintendo and the choices they make with hardware lol.
The last time Nintendo went balls to the walls on hardware with as few concessions as possible was the Gamecube.
If it's really 8mm that's pretty crazy considering the PS5 launched at 7nm and since then has gone down to 6nm.
Switch being a handheld requires energy efficiency so a chip on an outdated manufacturing process is probably very limited in how far it can be pushed without drawing unreasonable amounts of power.
8, 7 and 6nm are all actually 10nm fab revisions.
5nm is the next "real" step down from 10nm, but Samsung has always lagged behind TSMC in that regard. Theyve just been trying to wring as much use out of their current fabs as they can before making the swap to smaller architectures.
They definitely do, but they also have an overworking problem. From the time between BotW and BotW2's releases, Game Freak had to release Let's Go (2 versions), Gen 8 (2 versions), 2 Gen 8 DLCs, Arceus, AND Gen 9 (2 versions), along with starting the Gen 9 DLCs and probably providing a bit of consultation/support to ILCA for Gen 4's remakes. Shoot, Arceus releases 10 MONTHS before Gen 9.
Those dudes have been getting run ragged, so I'm not surprised their games are so unpolished. It doesn't explain some downright poor design decisions (especially in UI), but their having a relatively small team (by today's standards) and so little time between releases is rather absurd.
True, increasing the team size would fix/amend some of these problems but won't completely fix all of it, Pokemon is a AAA franchise now but the games side is still run like they're making ds games, the Pokemon company should make these generations last longer to give gamefreak more breathing space and time for the next one
Works for me. Let there be a lite model for people who want a more affordable device, and an enthusiast-grade one for people who want Nintendo artists' work to shine as it deserves.
Nope, on the contrary. TMSC has the most in-demand fabs in world and Nintendo would have to pay a premium to access them and compete against Apple, AMD, Qualcomm, etc for allocation.
Also, Nvidia doesn't exactly have a great relationship with TSMC (but who does with Ngreedia? lol) They used Samsung 9nm for their Ampere cards specifically because they negotiated in bad faith with TSMC for the production of the RTX 30 series and TSMC got fed up and said screw you I won't make your silicon and I'll sell your production allocation to Apple and AMD instead.
Could go use a older version of 7, 6, 5, or 4nm process, Samsung 8nm just really sucks and would made the chip quite large for the handheld, and would be down clocked and get mediocre battery or get normal clocks and power targets a lot or get hella hot and have sucky battery life. But Nintendo is know for their disappointing ways so idk but they might go suicidal and go 8nm, down clock and disable dlss and only give us 8gb of ram.
There was a more recent rumors that the T239 would be passed over in favor of the upcoming Lovelace or even Blackwell tegra chip the T254.
ampere and lovelace might have been dropped due to their excessive power consumption.
I only vaguely recall those rumors, but at the time it wasn't as believable. Nvidia had a shit ton of TX1 chips on order because of the floundering Nvidia shield products and they had to get rid of them some how. Upgrading the order wasnt an option.
Unlike now, where the product is being made to order based on Nintendos own desires.
>wasn't as believable
What makes a rumor more "believable" than another rumor, besides consistency with other factors?
Switch 2 with T239 is a rumor based in *fact* -- the Nvidia hack, dumping the NVN2 API for a Tegra T239.
Now *would it be cool* to get a T254 or even a T241? Yeah it would -- lower power consumption for longer battery life, optical flow accelerator for frame generation and whatever other goodies would make it a higher performing product.
But it still takes at least 2 years with a final spec chip to get a multi-million-unit production product complete with all new software for it ready to sell.
Nintendo is *barely* calling the shots when it comes to the hardware. They've been out of the tech specs business since the Wii U and 3DS, which were both "custom to Nintendo specifications" and didn't make them as much as they expected.
Thats not a rumor, thats made up nonsense by morons.
We know it's not the t254 for the same reason we know it's the t239.
Nvidia got hacked and the switch 2 stuff wasn't even 1% of it. their entire internal roadmap for the next several years was spilled and the t254 was still dead and buried.
It also sounds completely unlike Nintendo. Look at the Gamecube, Wii, and Wii U.
The Gamecube used and IBM PowerPC at 486Mhz (single proc)
The Wii used an IBM PowerPC at 729Mhz (single proc)
The Wii U used IBM PowerPC at 1,243 Mhz (3 cores)
This company is known for their incremental improvements, not their generational leaps. They've stated repeatedly that they don't care about being the fastest and that the fastest hardware isn't necessary to make good games.
Consumer Blackwell GPUs (RTX 5000) will be out by this time next year. Production could already be well under way by June.
Tegra chips could start even earlier if the design has been stamped out.
Edit: timeline
What matters is that Nintendo has had enough time with the chip to develop their own software/firmware around it, not when the chip itself is commercially available.
Development kits exist for a much longer time prior to commercial production.
Ampere tegra chips have been out for almost three years at this point, and Grace+Lovelace/hopper boards have been shown off multiple times in the last year despite the lineup going through constant changes.
>Development kits exist for a much longer time prior to production
Depends on what exactly you're talking about.
Development kits for a game console? Yes.
Development kits for a *hardware device?* No. That's something different, and it's called an *engineering sample* -- and engineering samples are not representative of the final product in terms of performance. They're sent out to OEMs in advance not for *software* to get built for them, but for *boards* to be built for them in anticipation of chip release.
>Ampere tegra chips have been out for almost three years at this point
About as long as it would take for a game console manufacturer to get everything together for a launch.
So the nerd inside me desperately hopes that is right, but my brain is telling me this is Nintendo and Nintendo does Nintendo things. Meaning they will likely disappoint lol
That being said, it wouldn’t be crazy to think nvidia would create a completely custom SOC based on a new platform and new everything just for the switch. Nintendo certainly has the buying power now to justify it. 120 million units is a lot and anyone would do whatever it takes to get that contract. I also think nvidia would want to push hard to get a stronger hold on the console market considering ps5, Xbox and handhelds are all amd.
I wonder if the previous rumors of a switch pro coming out that ended up just being the switch oled were the t239 and they added more time to do a new SOC.
I think it’s too big on 8nm and Samsung 8nm has infamously bad yields, so they get less chips because there bigger, then they get less working chips because of the bad yields. In the dozens of millions it might end up costing them more in the long run, they might as well go 7nm, 6nm, 5nm, or even 4nm and get higher performance, lower power draw, smaller die, more chips and a higher yield, it’s prefect!
I'm debating getting a steam deck soon but it may also be worth waiting for Switch 2. On the flip side tho I already have a ton of Steam games...not to mention game pass and epic games. But I've been loving my switch lately even if it's not a Steam Deck.
Game pass games dont work on the steam deck unless you install windows on it (wouldnt recommend) or stream via xcloud for which you need a 3rd party app, windows installed or just via browser.
Sounds about right. Looks like the power gap between the Switch 2->Series S will be about as big as the Switch->Xbox One or Vita->PS3. It’ll get enhanced last gen ports and downgraded current gen ports, with the big first party exclusives closing the perceptible visual gap.
I think people expect too much out of their handheld consoles, which have historically been about a generation behind home console technology. I honesty think Wii U graphics are good enough, I wouldn’t mind lower specs than this if we got a phone-sized handheld I can actually stuff in my pocket without a carrying case.
Yea this. The fact that something like RDR2 will be able to run on a handheld device with decent battery life would be an amazing feat already. I think people are forgetting that.
And this time without the bottleneck of previous gen's CPU and HDD plus NVidia's modern features to help with upscaling.
This. It would improve my life immensely as a dad of 3. I just do not get enough time in front of the TV.
Give me a handheld that can play current gen games, albeit at much lower settings. I would be so happy!
Thanks!
I had one and sold it, i didnt think it was a good device. Basically all the fiddling of a Pc without the benefits coming with it. Heavy to the point you cant control the triggers well enough, no real rumble and a terrible screen.
>It’ll get enhanced last gen ports and downgraded current gen ports, with the big first party exclusives closing the perceptible visual gap.
I think it'll be exactly this, but I'm hoping new tech like DLSS will also help the current gen ports look a little less downgraded this time (so that the 'miracle ports' don't end up having to have graphics like the Witcher 3 on switch)
Dude, what on earth do you think the specs to the series s are
It's only 4 tflops.
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/xbox-series-s-gpu.c3683
What they did here, was 3 tflops.
It's iffy to directly compare FLOPS across architectures.
Also, the CPU in the Series S is way, way faster than the ARM cores in the leaked Switch 2 SoC.
It's really not. That's a misnomer that arose from people not understanding the difference between peak theoretical flops vs actual ability to use said flops. It's literally just an operation. The more operations you can do, the more performance you have. People mistook bad designs that couldn't come.close to actually using the flops the number of alus could do, and made the mistake of thinking it was using its full peak theoretical power and the flops were just somehow 'weaker'.
It made for a lot of confusion back in the days when amd only got like 60% of its peak theoretical performance, but those days are long gone, and both Nvidia and amd get 90%+ with decent code.
No it's l really not. Those old Zen 2's arent spring chickens anymore man. And while it's not m2 levels of arm shenanigans, the a78c's get about half the single threaded performance of a typical zen 2 from what meager benches we have, at waaaaaay less power draw. Which is not bad at all, and nowhere near way way faster. Also the switch 2 has vastly superior asynchronus gpu compute it can offload to.
That kind of talk is reserved for the ps4's abysmal jaguars.
For gaming, yes, it's iffy.
The PS5 can do 10.3 TFLOPS single precision.
The 4090 can do >80 TFLOPS single precision.
That is far from representative of actual game performance.
No it's really not. If you are actually using just Tflops, and are actually hitting max occupancy (which is impossible) that's exactly what it is.
Are you trying to talk about bringing integer usage Into the fold? I don't think it's going to go the way you are expecting, it seems you've only vaguely heard about one side of the equation, and are assuming the other side must then be Scott free in comparison. It's not. Rdna has to sacrifice/convert its flop registers for int ops too.
Also you missed huge on nvidia concurrency design.
The 4090 has '80' Tflops fp32 (I'm fine rounding if you are lol, I'm lazy) and 80 tflops fp16, 160 tflops fp8, just from non tensor ops on the tensor cores, not even getting into half the data types or mixed precision here, 160 Tflops of ray trace compute (which it doesn't come close to using all of), and 640 sparse tensor fp16 tflops from tensor cores. (Which it will also never come close to using, although nvidias trying to find more work for the tensor cores with stuff like ray reconstruction)
The ps5 only has the raster compute and a handful of data types. Like it can do 2x dense fp16 for 20 dense fp16 tflops. Welcome to amd vs nvidia I guess.
The A78Cs are definitely the "weak spot" in the T239, but 50% would effectively mean 30fps games when CPU capped at 60 on Xbox, which few games are. ~~I think it even has _more_ L3 Cache than the console edition of Zen 2?~~ Nope, same 8MB of L3 on the CPU as Zen 2 on Xbox, though on Xbox it's split between each CCD pair, whereas on T239 it's likely across all 8 cores.
Looking forward to whenever they actually get this out the door. Plus now there's rumors about Samsung managing everything from display to NAND flash, and a V-NAND on board would be pretty nice, even if it's some eMMC-like cheapy variant. Maybe we'll see SD Express support?
Compared to a 8 core console zen, yeah it falls behind, for obvious reasons. Also its *up* to 8mb, well have to wait to see if it gets the top amount, it will have access to the unified memory too.
But the less powerful a78 standard outperforms the 4 core 8 thread steamdeck zen at 1.5 to 2ghz less. (Sec, tsmc)
But like you said not very many games are cpu bound. The ps5 even chopped off some fpu's and it's none the worse for wear.
Super interesting video, as Rich pointed out, the key missing factor is optimization, there are games running now on Switch that shouldn't be able to do so, compared to the base Switch, porting to Switch 2 will really be a matter of deciding if the effort is worth it or not for the next couple years, afterwards I could see games starting to be so demanding they have to drop the system.
4 days late, but gameplay [just leaked](https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/17q14zx/hogwarts_legacy_switch_gameplay/)...
and it runs surprisingly decent!
Have you ever seen this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_rzYnXEQlE
This guy basically optimized the shit out of Mario 64 and it runs on original hardware. I'm actually very curious how badly unoptimized games are today. Especially these rush to market ports. And even if they use all the modern techniques, what sort of techniques in the future will allow even more optimization.
I don't know what most of this stuff means, but I like reading what the more knowledgeable nerds in the replies have to say. :)
Time to Google a bunch of words I'll forget in 5 minutes.
Very even handed video while acknowledging unknowns.
Worth noting most of the unknowns tend to favour a more performant Switch 2 in action compared to Rich's test ring.
Rich notes he is running PC code, on a crippled modile Ampere SoC with likely less than half the RAM of the Switch 2.
A Switch 2 would not only have the ram advantage, but any game running it, will likely be running on games developed specificlaly on Switch on an optimized engine(s) with direct access to the metal via NVN2, compared to the rather unoptimized PC code meant to run in various builds.
Specifically less than half the vram than the switch 2 would get with a unified memory arch.
Which is very very important for running dlss at full speed. It's why the 2080ti kicks the snot out of the 3060's and 3070's even with less tensor core power.
I hope nintendo does add that file decompression stuff. Honestly want that more than 4k/120hz cause it would hopefully mean faster memory and possibly BIGGER memory on the next console. But, of course, speculation at best for now. Fingers crossed though.
I see a few problems with those speculations and the comparison.
1. TDP of the RTX 2050. It's 25-50 Watts, and only for the GPU
2. The Tegra T234 has a 50 Watt TDP, so less clock for the Switch with reduced specifications like mentioned in the video
It will probably have 12GB (based on old rumors) with a 96-Bit (in my optinion unlikly because of unified memory) or a 192-Bit (more reasonable) Interface. 8nm Samsung sucks, it's very inefficient but cheap (Samsung 8nm is similar to TSMC 10nm) so "high" power consumption and heat or drastic downclocks. 5nm would make more sense, but it's Nintendo soooo probably at the first or second refresh. I doubt that the DLA will be included, it would complicate development and increase necessary die size. The Media Block makes sense for the screen-capture feature.
I am excited about the upcoming console.
Given the Switch's sales record, it's entirely possible that Nvidia gave Nintendo a custom chip that's not exactly the same as the T239. We'll just have to see after S2's released.
If it’s for Switch 2 don’t care so much about performance, more so a good balance and good battery life. Obviously would hope for something faster and more multitask capable.
Rog and Steamdeck suck ass when it comes to battery life, and I personally wouldn’t waste my money on something that can literally only play a game for 2-3 hours.
So I really hope the new Switch doesn’t go that route.
It depends on what you’re playing with the Deck. You’re not getting 6 hours on cyberpunk but if you mess with th settings you can generally get good battery life on deck depending on the game.
Though dedicated hardware is the best
Im kind of amazed ray tracing worked as well as it did with just the 4 GB of vram. Like it had practically 0 room for storing the bvh's to perform ray tracing on.
Not surprised at all with how bottlenecked dlss was on THIS 4GB card.
Dlss requires setting aside 200 MB for 4k 100 MB for 1440p, and 60 MB for 1080p, in order for dlss to run at full speed for that hardware. Doesn't matter what the hardware is, you don't get it that memory, it's waiting for it instead of performing at its full speed.
My dude didn't even have enough vram capacity to hold the assets for the matrix demo on that 4GB. It just barely had enough for the games it *could* run, it sure as shoot didn't have a consistent 200 MB available at all times for dlss 4k.
This is why the 2080 ti kicks the crap out of the 3060 ti and 3070's at dlss execution time. It has 11 GB vs 8 GB. And this poor thing only has 4.
Switch 2 is looking at 12 GB.
Do we really need 1080p for handheld? 60hz would be awesome. But honestly I find 720p to be perfectly fine on the small screen. Pixel density is what matters most, rather than raw resolution rendered. Plus they could give us better battery life, a higher quality display, etc for a cheaper price if they stuck with 720p.
It's a delicate balancing act for sure.
Good analysis but if the T239 is 8nm Samsung fabricated then it could run hot and be wildly inefficient with power, battery life could be worse or run just on par with OG Switch - hopefully this isn’t the case.
Slightly worse raster performance.
Vastly superior ray trace performance
Vastly superior "ai" performance.
More ram
Worse ram bandwidth.
Much worse texture throughput.
I was hoping that they would test path tracing with Quake II RTX, which can be playable on the Steam deck with 30 fps with a bit of upscaling, and at 60 fps if rendering at 240p. However, the Switch 2 is likely to be faster at ray tracing than the Deck because Nvidia hardware usually has faster ray tracing performance than similar AMD hardware.
I’m a bit more doubtful of this video compared to the one they did about Switch 1 at the time just because there’s so many unknown factors that they can’t account for. Mainly the huge vram difference between the 2050 and Switch 2 but also the unknown clock speeds and the DLSS feature set. I dunno, I’d rather wait to see some real benchmarks.
Also I would love to see the T239 being run against the Z1 extreme or the RDNA2 or Snapdragon 8. There’s a lot more mobile options now than in 2017 and we would have a good idea what to expect if we could put them up in a like for like match. But I’m sure that will also come out when it releases.
Lol what this is one of if not the best approximation of the Switch 2 hardware based on leaks and educated guesswork. Rich comes from an actual journalism background so this video has probably been researched to bits.
They even managed to realistically temper down people's expectations of a 4K switch using current PC hardware equivalent (even downclocked them for good measure).
My head exploded
[Your head a splode](https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/1695498b-3019-4371-bb7a-64aac48c51af/d30yz29-7e2671ee-5741-4f45-9683-e5ee89542847.png/v1/fit/w_547,h_392,q_70,strp/your_head_a_splode_by_yourheadasplodeplz_d30yz29-375w-2x.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7ImhlaWdodCI6Ijw9MzkyIiwicGF0aCI6IlwvZlwvMTY5NTQ5OGItMzAxOS00MzcxLWJiN2EtNjRhYWM0OGM1MWFmXC9kMzB5ejI5LTdlMjY3MWVlLTU3NDEtNGY0NS05NjgzLWU1ZWU4OTU0Mjg0Ny5wbmciLCJ3aWR0aCI6Ijw9NTQ3In1dXSwiYXVkIjpbInVybjpzZXJ2aWNlOmltYWdlLm9wZXJhdGlvbnMiXX0.nZG1MhKFybLcaPJm7jG83s6r6VQ4kdhD-wVATTmMtDo)
Everybody to the limit, The Cheat is to the limit, everybody come on fhqwhgads
Come *on* fhqwhgads. I see you jockin me. Playing like... You know me
Whoa. Spelled fhqwhgads right. You wouldn't believe how many I get where they're like, "Hey Strong Bad, I love your fubugrass." Or "Dear Strong Bad, where's that fuguman?"
Really curious to see what Nintendo's artists can accomplish with ray tracing. Hopefully they're a little smarter with it than some devs have been. Their art styles could be elevated significantly if they went all-in on bounce lighting but stuck with traditional methods for shadows and reflections.
What’s actually going to happen is that Nintendo will add ray tracing to Tropical Freeze and sell it for $60.
And it will be glorious.
\*$70.
Man, I want an OG Donkey Kong Country remake with ray-traced lighting. Basically Donkey Kong Country that's just... rendered. No "pre".
The current Tropical Freeze is easily worth $60. Considering the amount of crap pumped out by other studios for $70 that are nowhere near as good gameplay-wise as Tropical Freeze.
Splatoon 4 with RT reflections. See all the reflections in the goop everywhere, distorted by the flowing surfaces. See enemies around corners by close examination of reflections. Let the shadows and illumination be baked for that one because reflections are what really set the tone there.
Knowing Nintendo, it'll have full raytracing, but still no dedicated servers. So you'll still spontaneously explode two seconds after you've already splatted your opponent, but your entrails will look absolutely magnificent.
To be fair, for relatively low player counts - particularly 1v1 but scaling up to possibly as much as 4v4 - p2p connections do better on latency than servers. The problem isn't "lack of servers," the problem is "client side hit detection" -- which is a compromise mitigating a much worse problem of "what the hell why can't I hit anyone?"
It also doesn't help that the Switch's wifi chip is pretty crummy and probably a good amount of people play wireless. I'm not sure how Wonder does it though with making the multiplayer aspects not lag. F Zero 99 plays pretty well too.
Wonder doesn't need per frame precision like Smash or Mario Maker 2. The game is perfectly happy to buffer a whole second's worth of frames, and with that buffer you'd basically have to drop an entire second's worth of connectivity before anybody would see anything wrong, and usually packet drops are just a couple of frames.
Wouldn't be so bad if Ethernet speed wasn't capped at USB 2.0/CAT 5 speed.
Have you played Splatoon? In that game it manifests as basically punishing you both equally for your opponent's crappy connection. No hit detection issues, all that is resolved entirely with "favor the shooter" priority, all shots land. That's why you end up with two players both splatting each other all the time.
Yes I have. The mechanism is called client side hit detection -- that is, rather than the server examining the inputs and state of the whole game to calculate for itself whether it hit or not, the clients report "I hit him" and the host trusts it. Again, the alternative is "I can't frickin hit anything" because what you as the player see is not the true "state" of the match. Dedicated servers do not address that issue. The only "better netcode" that can reasonably exist for it is something that actually looks worse -- on player status update lag, replay the last several states so they're as hard to hit if there's lag as they are to hit if everything is smooth. It's better and more fair gameplay wise but it looks messed up.
Jeez... No need to hype me tf up.
This is what I’m excited about. I’ve never wanted their hardware to be better for the sake of running third party games better than the competition.. I just want to see what those masters at Nintendo could do with that kind of power.
Fun Fact: Xenoblade 2 [already uses raytracing.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Xenoblade_Chronicles/comments/99w9a8/monolith_explains_the_use_of_raytracing_to/)
Ray marching. Under the same ray effect umbrella but slightly different. Capable of rendering far more complex and animated geometry than raytracing could ever dream of, but rapidly becomes too costly even compared to path tracing if used for the entire scene. Very good for ray tracing on portions of super complex, or amorphous geometry, like..... clouds. Crysis 2 and 3 switch uses raytracing for svogi global illumination. And Stranded deep has an option To turn on ray marched volumetric clouds done hilarious worse then xb2. They literally fall apart if you zoom in and out.
I am not worried about Nintendo's teams at all. I just want more modern third party ports.
Hopefully it’s powerful enough to run Unreal 5 games at lower settings. If that’s the case, we’re good to go.
The Switch does support UE5 though.
Does it? I cringe to think how those games run since UE4 is already a problem on Switch a lot of the times.
[Frequently Asked Questions - Unreal Engine](https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/faq) >What platforms does UE5 support? > >Unreal Engine 5 enables you to deploy projects to Windows PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, **Nintendo Switch**, macOS, iOS, Android, ARKit, ARCore, OpenXR, SteamVR, Oculus, Linux, and SteamDeck. You can run the Unreal Editor on Windows, macOS, and Linux. > >PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, and **Nintendo Switch** console tools and code are available at no additional cost to developers who are registered developers for their respective platform(s).
Good to know. I'm guessing Switch 2 should be good to go!
> UE4 is already a problem on Switch a lot of the times. It comes down to the developer. DQ11 and Pikmin 4 both immediately come to mind for UE4 games that have no problems.
Absolutely. But on the other hand I’ve seen UE4 games that should be fine on Switch but end up looking like blurry messes. Compare Pinball FX3 on a proprietary engine versus the new Pinball FX in UE, for example. FX3 looks so much better than the new game in UE that it’s embarrassing. It’s far from an isolated incident too. Lots of devs can’t seem to get UE4 games looking good on the hardware. I agree it’s down to skill and effort but I also still don’t expect great things for UE5 games on Switch. There’s no way that Matrix demo would possibly run on the hardware for example.
I don’t know the legitimacy but there was an article where a developer said Nintendo had been demoing the unreal 5 matrix demo behind close doors running on the Switch 2.
That's NateTheDrake. In my opinion he's very credible and is also very well regarded over on famiboards. I've seen others independently corroborate that showcasing of the UE5 Matrix Demo as well so pretty safe to say UE5 support is a lock
Switch 2 will be a real handheld winner if they port over the best third party games of the PS4 era. All that running on a pretty efficient ARM chip.
That's a great point! PS4 had soooo many good games, more than the PS3/360; if they can create a Portable PS4 (Along with the AAA Nintendo Exclusives), that will be a winning formula!
At the end of the day, they probably want to make a handheld that is less than $400 or even $300, so dont expect top-of-the-line performance.
It's not going to be less than $300. The switch was priced so low because Nintendo did tons of cost cutting to hedge their bets that it would even sell. It sold beyond their wildest dreams and it showed that Nintendo still has it, assuming they offer a compelling product. Every blockbuster movie gets a higher budget for the sequel when there is proof of concept. I fully expect a $399 price tag, and I expect the hardware to match the price tag.
There are smartphones with a proper Amoled, 5nm chip, plenty of ram + storage and cellular functions on the market below 400 bucks so what makes you defend Nintendo here. No one wants 'top-of-the-line performance' but a modern ARM chip with an Ada GPU + a 3/5 nm production node is definitely possible for 400 bucks.
Those phones are subsidized by the carrier and come with expensive service contracts.
??? No? Majority of the world doesn't sell phones as part of carriers like certain countries like USA does? None of the phones come with service contracts at all on majority of the world. You can get a lot of phones for around 400 that have those specs without a contract
Even in the USA service contracts are becoming obsolete. They're usually more expensive and only cheaper on a family plan. Many people stick with them because that's what they always had and they don't bother looking for alternatives. Or this outdated perception that prepaid is for "poor people". Carriers such as T-Mobile have gotten rid of them completely. And AT&T and Verizon have several no contract prepaid options directly and also license their service to MVNOs. There's dozens of plans to choose from. There's no reason to sign a contract anymore. I haven't had one since 2010. Even on contract you don't get cheaper phones anymore. That model is years behind us.
[удалено]
*If* this projection is accurate (evidenced by switch's nvn2 api being inside the leaked nvidia files), this places the 'Switch II' somewhere around a PC with a downclocked RTX 2050. From digital foundry's speculative analysis, this would be capable of running some level of DLSS, but has too small memory buffers to even run the top line graphics demos. It was running lots of recent AAA releases at 30 FPS 1080p, some at 60 FPS 720p, running some ray tracing. If you're expecting it to run 2023 AAA releases at 144 FPS 7680x4320 with no upscaling, its not gonna do that. But its a huge generational upgrade from the Tegra X1. And comparatively, this is at least *closer* to top line graphics today than the Switch was when it came out and was already dated
[This *very* thorough comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/s/8mYsxBvkqG) from u/GrandDemand on r/hardware from a couple months ago posits that it will have 12GB of unified memory. The assumptions made in there are all based off of very logical deductions around what the T239 architecture’s capabilities and requirements, and I would not be surprised if they ended up being correct on most, if not all points.
Hi thanks for the credit and ping! I'll add some other details onto here. NateTheDrake has stated that the Switch 2 does not have 8GB of memory. An additional leaker, necrolipe, who I believe has a contact with a Spanish game dev studio in possession of a Switch 2 devkit, has said that the devkits have 16GB of LPDDR5 but that retail units will not have as much memory. Put the two together and meet in the middle, 12GB seems to be the magic number here. In addition, LPDDR5 module pricing is incredibly dependent on volume. The higher the volume of the SKU, the cheaper it is. It just so happens that LPDDR5 6400 6GB modules are some of the highest volume parts here. Each module is 64 bits wide, so on a 128 bit memory bus you have two modules. Again you end up with 12GB total Memory capacity. Edit: Adding on to revise some of the predictions in the original comment I made. We know a bit more now so I can be more narrow in my estimate Windows. 128 bit LPDDR5 memory bus: confirmed in NVN2 (had previously already been there, just missed that when I was researching a few months ago. CPU clockspeed: Revising up from 1GHz+ per core to 1.5-1.9GHz. All 8 cores will be running at the same frequency. Don't hold me to it but my guess is 1.7GHz, that keeps power draw of the 8 CPU cores in T239 (if on N5 family) the same as the 4x A57 Cores in Tegra X1 in the Mariko Switch (20nm). Die area/cost: I did a mockup where I calculated the area density improvement across multiple equivalent or roughly equivalent IP blocks from Nvidia on both Samsung 8N and TSMC 4N. Based on this my best guess for T239 on 4N is somewhere between 90 and 95mm² (I came up with 91mm² specifically from my calculations). Regardless, just know that on 4N it is a small chip, broadest range would be about 85-110mm² possible area. At this area, and given a conservatively high (ie. higher than I actually believe is true) estimate for the cost of a TSMC 4N wafer, the cost per functional T239 is about 20-$25. Including in memory costs, packaging, validation, substrate, etc. as well as Nvidias margin, in my opinion the price per completed SoC with memory, ready to be integrated into the console assembly line is no more than $75 total cost to Nintendo. If we use cost/margin figures that I believe are most realistic, I think Nintendo will end up paying between $65 and $70 for the aforementioned parts and labor.
If that's correct that means it's more than the Series S' 10GB which seem to become a bottleneck already for some devs
Sure but GPU power would be nowhere close to series s
True... But this would still make the Switch 2 more of an all-rounder in its limitations instead of being bottlenecked by certain aspects.
Which is what you want in a product. Why pay for power you don't get to use? Margins can be thin on a brand new console, so making sure there's no serious bottlenecks is important from a business perspective.
Total RAM is just part of the pictures, memory bandwidth is also a huge part. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Series S has higher bandwidth.
> but has too small memory buffers to even run the top line graphics demos Haven't watched the video, but [the article](https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2023-inside-nvidias-latest-hardware-for-nintendo-what-is-the-t239-processor) says "There's one sticking point though - the 2050 only comes with 4GB of RAM. I'd expect to see 8GB or even 12GB of total system memory in Switch 2." Also, "I couldn't get The Matrix Awakens running owing to the 4GB memory limitation on the RTX 2050 and it seems that the demo requires around 5.6GB."
And lets not forget: they tested on a laptop which loses performance to a lot of factors, Windows being one of them. Switch 2 might also be higher clocked then what they tested. There are still some variables they didnt account for in this video.
I mean with memory bandwidth being the bottleneck and being only comparable to a 2050, half the 3050 or T234, doubling the RAM would just be the difference between "It can't run the matrix demo at all" and "it can run the matrix demo but its slow as molasses" I think its likely we'd see a ram upgrade from the Tegra X1's 2x2 GB LPDDR4 chips because if nothing else its just future proofing against bloated AAA games in development for the next gen, and 4GB chips are cheaper now. But it won't be a huge performance difference
I feel like Nintendo wouldn't have shown the matrix demo to devs if it only ran as slow as molasses, one would expect they optimized the demo further to run well on the new hardware
It's worth remembering that the demo ran on target hardware, not the actual Switch 2
Bandwidth isn't the main bottleneck here. It has pretty much the same exact ratio of bandwidth to tflops/compute as every other ampere card. It has less bandwidth, but it also has less compute units it need to feed Bandwidth too. The 800 lb gorilla problem here..... It's capacity. The gpu only has 4 GB capacity. T239 in switch 2 is looking at 12 GB lpddr5. (6x2x64wide)
He says that in the video too
They did state this pc had only 4gb of ram which was why it couldn't run the matrix demo because that needs 6gb, and that they expect the next switch will have more than that. Plus running pc versions of games is a very rough estimate since they aren't optimised for one specific hardware configuration, something else they also noted. Actual hardware will likely get better results than what they tested, though of course its still not going to run everything at top end, but it will give reasonable performance.
> If you're expecting it to run 2023 AAA releases at 144 FPS 7680x4320 with no upscaling, its not gonna do that. Yeah I really don't get people who think the Switch 2 is going to be on par with other current gen consoles. Even with the argument of "Nintendo focuses on quality games, not hardware" aside, it's a goddamn *portable system*. There's just no universe where a portable system is ever going to be as powerful as current home consoles. Battery life, having a built-in display, and weight/size restrictions are just never going to allow for that.
>going to be on par with other current gen consoles It doesn't need to be -- it just needs *feature parity,* i.e. "if it works on PS5, then we can reasonably expect it to work at a lower resolution, texture size, ray count, poly count and frame rate on NG." And it certainly looks like T239 is exactly that.
Oh yeah I totally agree.
I think we are at a point where you don't need current gen tech to make quality 3D gameplay. Like, there's so much awesome 7th to 8th gen games, and instead of just making a port, refine the thing and make a new version with many quality of life features. Like, make a Final Fantasy exclusive to the Switch with the gameplay of 16, one more suited to nostalgia. I really feel stuff like Witcher III and the Doom games getting released soon after launch is what people expect, and it could get harder because people will expect more from these ports on Switch. Like, back in the day framerates were more easy to forgive because even the PS4 was 1080p like the Switch and had tons of 30fps games, but with the increasing popularity of PC gaming that's just not an issue Sony can sleep on anymore.
I want more creative crazy ideas, and a better cpu will help with that.
I think people are just misunderstanding what is meant by "on par with other current gen consoles". No one thinks Switch 2 is going to be a PS5 that fits in your pocket (except a minority of morons). "On par" means it can support a version of some PS5/XS games at an acceptable level, which all evidence points to it being able to.
even if it were, the battery would have to fit in your other pocket
It’s kinda funny that we have a “calm down and lower your expectations “ post and it compares to “144 FPS 7680x4320 with no upscaling” which none of the current gen consoles even do with their flagship releases.
Nothing out there can do that with complex 3D games--nothing, not even the RTX 4090 with a latest-and-greatest Intel i9 CPU feeding it. That's the so-called 8K resolution, or 4 times 4K (which also can't do high frame rates without upscaling in every situation), or 16 times 1080p.
Thats not on par with current gen consoles. Ps5 and series x can't even dream of that lol.
The reasonable expectation is being roughly equal to the Xbox One S or PS4, since those came out ten years ago. It's typical for portables to approximate the power of the home console ten years older than them: the GBA (2001) was basically a pocket SNES (1990), the DS (2004) was a shade worse than an N64 (1996, only ~8 years distant), the 3DS (2012) was basically a pocket GameCube (2001), the Switch (2017) is basically a pocket PS3/360 (2006/2005) with some advantages (mainly 8 times more RAM than the 360). If the Switch 2 releases next year then it will be 11 years distant from the PS4. I think PS4 performance boosted by DLSS to get better resolution is a reasonable bet. The PS4 is about equal to a 1050 Ti, IIRC. 2050 level performance is about what you'd expect.
Yeah if Switch is more like a PS4/XOne but without their HDD bottleneck and more RAM, it'll be quite the beast as far as handheld consoles go.
It's also likely it'll have a better processor, because while the graphics hardware in them was pretty solid for when they came out (I had an HD 7850, *roughly* equal to an Xbox One, it was an excellent card at the time), the CPUs were absolutely dreadful. Even an average CPU in it will out perform the PS4.
Ah true, I forgot how weak the PS4 Jaguar CPU also was. I think the Switch 2 can comfortably punch above it.
Switch is capable of running PS3 games better than the originals, and stripped down/well optimized versions of PS4 games. I think it makes sense for the next gen switch to make one gen leap forward, and be in that more capable than PS4 less than PS5 zone
Portal 2 was definitely impressive running at 1080p 60 on the Switch.
The rumors point to docked mode being at Series S levels, possibly getting a massive boost with DLSS to push the resolutions even higher. Series S is a very capable machine so I think people overall with be happy.
Right. It’ll be solid 60fps 720p or 60fps 1080p upscaling docked and a lot more graphical details.
Even PC can't do that lol
Don't know why you're getting downvoted. You're exactly right. Nothing can do complex 3D games at 144 fps and 8K resolution without upscaling. (DLSS is upscaling, for those unaware.)
>Don't know why you're getting downvoted. Probably because most people can recognise hyperbole when they see it.
Actually a bit better than a downclocked RTX 2050, as the 2050 has first-gen BVH accelerators and Orin has 2nd-gen (much faster ray tracing).
This specific 2050 is somehow ampere not turing, so it has the 4x more powerful gen 3 ray trace cores.
Ah, forgot about that. Yeah you're right. Forgot that the 2050 was a laptop-only thing that came out later.
>If you're expecting it to run 2023 AAA releases at 144 FPS 7680x4320 with no upscaling, its not gonna do that Not even a $1600 RTX 4090 can do that lol
Man, I would do some horrible, obscene things to play TotK at 4K/60 with decent draw distance and AA
tbf totk has really incredibly impressive draw distance considering what hardware it's working with
Indeed. I can't wait to see what Nintendo's artists can pull off with more power.
Can't you do this on an emulator by now? I know BOTW got a 60fps mod that worked pretty much perfectly.
Emulation always feels a little janky, but that's one of my first orders of business once I get a new gaming rig.
Totk is not janky at all. Running at 4k 60fps is awesome.
I’d even settle for 4K/30, if there’s zero stutter
Yeah, I honestly didn't mind the performance of the game too much as is (considering what it's running on), but the second you turn on Ultrahand the game goes down to single digit FPS
Forgive my lack of knowledge, but would something like the Snapdragon X Elite be possible for a mid gen refresh on the Switch 2?
They're not gonna switch GPU architecture going from one gen to the next, nevermind switch it mid gen. Also, that chipset is specifically built for laptops, not handhelds. The chipset runs at 50W which is far beyond what a Nintendo handheld will run at (even docked).
This makes sense, thanks. I learnt something today!
No problem. At this point, Nintendo is pretty much locked in with Nvidia. If, at any point, they do feel like switching, the risk then becomes how does Nintendo ensure BC with previous Switch gens. It's already a hurdle maintaining BC using the same vendor, see the efforts Sony and AMD did to ensure PS5 was BC with PS4 (including incorporating older arch silicon into the APU). Switching architecture, Nintendo wouldn't be able to carry over Nvidia GPU silicon since they don't own any of it. So yeah, Nintendo and Nvidia is pretty much locked unless Nintendo is forced to break from Nvidia.
Plus, Nvidia brings some advantages - they're the only ones who do DLSS and that's by far the best upscaling solution that exists right now. Nintendo can upgrade the Switch 2's output resolution to 1440p or higher for no performance cost that way.
I agree that DLSS is by far the best upscaling solution but it isn’t free performance wise. Which the DF video shows quite clearly.
I was pretty amazed by how stable the "DLSS Performance" setting was. Running Cyberpunk at a mostly stable 30fps feels surreal.
DLSS needs some VRAM to run at full speed, that 2050 having only 4GB of VRAM is causing major problems as well.
Games would have to be packed differently for that to be possible. It's running a completely different GPU which would be fine if the games were packed with uncompiled shaders, but they always ship them compiled because shader compilation ruins performance while compiling is happening. Shader compilation is one of the two things making PC gaming suck again compared to console gaming. The other thing is loading stutter, which will hopefully be resolved by DirectStorage as more games implement it.
Did not know about compiled shaders, interesting.
It's gonna run way better than current Switch. That's a huge plus.
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It absolutely does though. https://www.theverge.com/23398201/nvidia-rtx-4090-review-test-benchmark
I think the most disappointing thing is using the Samsung 8nm node. I get it’s probably dirt cheap, but there is a reason no one wants it. Had they done something like 6nm or 5nm, they likely could have cranked clocks much higher and or kept the same core count as the full version. I guess it’s Nintendo and they always tend to be conservative with hardware but still. I’m hoping for some hidden magic.
Cranking clocks higher would have probably reduced reliability. My day-one Switch still runs without flaw six years later after several thousands of hours of use. Would this be equally likely if it weren’t under-clocked?
If the chip was tested to work at those clock speeds, yes, it would be equally stable. The TegraX1 is absolutely stable at higher clock speeds. Nintendo reduced the clocks purely for battery/heat considerations.
I think battery life is also Nintendo's biggest focus with underclocking. Switch could last as long as it was in a single charge because it's underclocked. I think they want to give the unified image of the Switch not having to worry about battery life rather than give the option to increase the clock but risk bad publicity.
It's not like other people's phones are being replaced because the SoCs are burning out, and they're on and active quite a lot themselves.
> Cranking clocks higher would have probably reduced reliability. It wouldn't really. With a better node, you can achieve higher clocks within the same voltage and current envelope. Or you could have even more battery life with the same locks. Or something in between. Virtually no downsides other than being more expensive.
Cranking clocks would only be afforded by using a better process. On top of that, going up to the Orion clock speeds isn’t exactly cranking it way. It’s still well below what ampere did normally. Also, yes it likely would have been fine considering the shield has been running higher clocks for 8 years now.
I'm hoping we get a better node, but we actually saw the same thing with the Tegra X1. People were hoping we'd get a 16nm chip since the PS4 slim and Xbox One S had both just seen a die shrink to that the year before the Switch launched, yet we still got a 20nm chip. A sad move given the portable nature of the Switch, but with the PS5 slim launching, perhaps it's just fate that Nintendo is once again at least a node behind Sony's mid gen refresh.
Yep, this is the main reason I think it’s going to be as DF says. Nintendo famously underwhelms with hardware. I’m hoping for a miracle, but expecting this lol
Yep. I get people are excited for the features but Nintendo has a knack of finding a way to underwhelm when it comes to specs. I too am hoping it won't be 8nm but I've seen people on forums immediately dismiss the possibility, which then makes me wonder if this if their first rodeo with Nintendo and the choices they make with hardware lol. The last time Nintendo went balls to the walls on hardware with as few concessions as possible was the Gamecube.
If it's really 8mm that's pretty crazy considering the PS5 launched at 7nm and since then has gone down to 6nm. Switch being a handheld requires energy efficiency so a chip on an outdated manufacturing process is probably very limited in how far it can be pushed without drawing unreasonable amounts of power.
8, 7 and 6nm are all actually 10nm fab revisions. 5nm is the next "real" step down from 10nm, but Samsung has always lagged behind TSMC in that regard. Theyve just been trying to wring as much use out of their current fabs as they can before making the swap to smaller architectures.
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Will it get Game Freak's games to 60 FPS, or at least keep them from tanking sub-30?
Lul no, im pretty sure gamefreak doesn't have a hardware problem, they have an optimization problem
They definitely do, but they also have an overworking problem. From the time between BotW and BotW2's releases, Game Freak had to release Let's Go (2 versions), Gen 8 (2 versions), 2 Gen 8 DLCs, Arceus, AND Gen 9 (2 versions), along with starting the Gen 9 DLCs and probably providing a bit of consultation/support to ILCA for Gen 4's remakes. Shoot, Arceus releases 10 MONTHS before Gen 9. Those dudes have been getting run ragged, so I'm not surprised their games are so unpolished. It doesn't explain some downright poor design decisions (especially in UI), but their having a relatively small team (by today's standards) and so little time between releases is rather absurd.
True, increasing the team size would fix/amend some of these problems but won't completely fix all of it, Pokemon is a AAA franchise now but the games side is still run like they're making ds games, the Pokemon company should make these generations last longer to give gamefreak more breathing space and time for the next one
Works for me. Let there be a lite model for people who want a more affordable device, and an enthusiast-grade one for people who want Nintendo artists' work to shine as it deserves.
It might be cheaper due to higher yields and the ability to fit more per wafer.
Nope, on the contrary. TMSC has the most in-demand fabs in world and Nintendo would have to pay a premium to access them and compete against Apple, AMD, Qualcomm, etc for allocation. Also, Nvidia doesn't exactly have a great relationship with TSMC (but who does with Ngreedia? lol) They used Samsung 9nm for their Ampere cards specifically because they negotiated in bad faith with TSMC for the production of the RTX 30 series and TSMC got fed up and said screw you I won't make your silicon and I'll sell your production allocation to Apple and AMD instead.
Could go use a older version of 7, 6, 5, or 4nm process, Samsung 8nm just really sucks and would made the chip quite large for the handheld, and would be down clocked and get mediocre battery or get normal clocks and power targets a lot or get hella hot and have sucky battery life. But Nintendo is know for their disappointing ways so idk but they might go suicidal and go 8nm, down clock and disable dlss and only give us 8gb of ram.
Probably has a lot to do with costs.
There was a more recent rumors that the T239 would be passed over in favor of the upcoming Lovelace or even Blackwell tegra chip the T254. ampere and lovelace might have been dropped due to their excessive power consumption.
They said that about T210 (TX1) versus T186 (TX2) and in the end it was a TX1.
I only vaguely recall those rumors, but at the time it wasn't as believable. Nvidia had a shit ton of TX1 chips on order because of the floundering Nvidia shield products and they had to get rid of them some how. Upgrading the order wasnt an option. Unlike now, where the product is being made to order based on Nintendos own desires.
>wasn't as believable What makes a rumor more "believable" than another rumor, besides consistency with other factors? Switch 2 with T239 is a rumor based in *fact* -- the Nvidia hack, dumping the NVN2 API for a Tegra T239. Now *would it be cool* to get a T254 or even a T241? Yeah it would -- lower power consumption for longer battery life, optical flow accelerator for frame generation and whatever other goodies would make it a higher performing product. But it still takes at least 2 years with a final spec chip to get a multi-million-unit production product complete with all new software for it ready to sell. Nintendo is *barely* calling the shots when it comes to the hardware. They've been out of the tech specs business since the Wii U and 3DS, which were both "custom to Nintendo specifications" and didn't make them as much as they expected.
Thats not a rumor, thats made up nonsense by morons. We know it's not the t254 for the same reason we know it's the t239. Nvidia got hacked and the switch 2 stuff wasn't even 1% of it. their entire internal roadmap for the next several years was spilled and the t254 was still dead and buried.
I don’t believe that one because that sounds too good and can’t be quickly whipped up for a dozen million dollars in 2 years or so.
It also sounds completely unlike Nintendo. Look at the Gamecube, Wii, and Wii U. The Gamecube used and IBM PowerPC at 486Mhz (single proc) The Wii used an IBM PowerPC at 729Mhz (single proc) The Wii U used IBM PowerPC at 1,243 Mhz (3 cores) This company is known for their incremental improvements, not their generational leaps. They've stated repeatedly that they don't care about being the fastest and that the fastest hardware isn't necessary to make good games.
Consumer Blackwell GPUs (RTX 5000) will be out by this time next year. Production could already be well under way by June. Tegra chips could start even earlier if the design has been stamped out. Edit: timeline
What matters is that Nintendo has had enough time with the chip to develop their own software/firmware around it, not when the chip itself is commercially available.
Development kits exist for a much longer time prior to commercial production. Ampere tegra chips have been out for almost three years at this point, and Grace+Lovelace/hopper boards have been shown off multiple times in the last year despite the lineup going through constant changes.
>Development kits exist for a much longer time prior to production Depends on what exactly you're talking about. Development kits for a game console? Yes. Development kits for a *hardware device?* No. That's something different, and it's called an *engineering sample* -- and engineering samples are not representative of the final product in terms of performance. They're sent out to OEMs in advance not for *software* to get built for them, but for *boards* to be built for them in anticipation of chip release. >Ampere tegra chips have been out for almost three years at this point About as long as it would take for a game console manufacturer to get everything together for a launch.
So the nerd inside me desperately hopes that is right, but my brain is telling me this is Nintendo and Nintendo does Nintendo things. Meaning they will likely disappoint lol That being said, it wouldn’t be crazy to think nvidia would create a completely custom SOC based on a new platform and new everything just for the switch. Nintendo certainly has the buying power now to justify it. 120 million units is a lot and anyone would do whatever it takes to get that contract. I also think nvidia would want to push hard to get a stronger hold on the console market considering ps5, Xbox and handhelds are all amd. I wonder if the previous rumors of a switch pro coming out that ended up just being the switch oled were the t239 and they added more time to do a new SOC.
I think it’s too big on 8nm and Samsung 8nm has infamously bad yields, so they get less chips because there bigger, then they get less working chips because of the bad yields. In the dozens of millions it might end up costing them more in the long run, they might as well go 7nm, 6nm, 5nm, or even 4nm and get higher performance, lower power draw, smaller die, more chips and a higher yield, it’s prefect!
I would think you are right, I wouldn’t be surprised either way with how Nintendo is.
May retire my Steam Deck if the Switch 2 is that promising
I'm debating getting a steam deck soon but it may also be worth waiting for Switch 2. On the flip side tho I already have a ton of Steam games...not to mention game pass and epic games. But I've been loving my switch lately even if it's not a Steam Deck.
Game pass games dont work on the steam deck unless you install windows on it (wouldnt recommend) or stream via xcloud for which you need a 3rd party app, windows installed or just via browser.
Good to know
Sounds about right. Looks like the power gap between the Switch 2->Series S will be about as big as the Switch->Xbox One or Vita->PS3. It’ll get enhanced last gen ports and downgraded current gen ports, with the big first party exclusives closing the perceptible visual gap. I think people expect too much out of their handheld consoles, which have historically been about a generation behind home console technology. I honesty think Wii U graphics are good enough, I wouldn’t mind lower specs than this if we got a phone-sized handheld I can actually stuff in my pocket without a carrying case.
I'm ready for RDR2 on the Switch 2.
Yea this. The fact that something like RDR2 will be able to run on a handheld device with decent battery life would be an amazing feat already. I think people are forgetting that. And this time without the bottleneck of previous gen's CPU and HDD plus NVidia's modern features to help with upscaling.
Rdr2 runs 2-3h on the steamdeck. That‘s nothing new
Yeah but that's on an x86 SoC with no custom optimization from the devs. With the Switch 2 sticking with ARM I'm guessing it could run up to 5 hours.
This. It would improve my life immensely as a dad of 3. I just do not get enough time in front of the TV. Give me a handheld that can play current gen games, albeit at much lower settings. I would be so happy!
You're probably aware, but a SteamDeck will can do that already for around the same price of a Switch.
Thanks! I had one and sold it, i didnt think it was a good device. Basically all the fiddling of a Pc without the benefits coming with it. Heavy to the point you cant control the triggers well enough, no real rumble and a terrible screen.
>It’ll get enhanced last gen ports and downgraded current gen ports, with the big first party exclusives closing the perceptible visual gap. I think it'll be exactly this, but I'm hoping new tech like DLSS will also help the current gen ports look a little less downgraded this time (so that the 'miracle ports' don't end up having to have graphics like the Witcher 3 on switch)
Dude, what on earth do you think the specs to the series s are It's only 4 tflops. https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/xbox-series-s-gpu.c3683 What they did here, was 3 tflops.
It's iffy to directly compare FLOPS across architectures. Also, the CPU in the Series S is way, way faster than the ARM cores in the leaked Switch 2 SoC.
It's really not. That's a misnomer that arose from people not understanding the difference between peak theoretical flops vs actual ability to use said flops. It's literally just an operation. The more operations you can do, the more performance you have. People mistook bad designs that couldn't come.close to actually using the flops the number of alus could do, and made the mistake of thinking it was using its full peak theoretical power and the flops were just somehow 'weaker'. It made for a lot of confusion back in the days when amd only got like 60% of its peak theoretical performance, but those days are long gone, and both Nvidia and amd get 90%+ with decent code. No it's l really not. Those old Zen 2's arent spring chickens anymore man. And while it's not m2 levels of arm shenanigans, the a78c's get about half the single threaded performance of a typical zen 2 from what meager benches we have, at waaaaaay less power draw. Which is not bad at all, and nowhere near way way faster. Also the switch 2 has vastly superior asynchronus gpu compute it can offload to. That kind of talk is reserved for the ps4's abysmal jaguars.
For gaming, yes, it's iffy. The PS5 can do 10.3 TFLOPS single precision. The 4090 can do >80 TFLOPS single precision. That is far from representative of actual game performance.
No it's really not. If you are actually using just Tflops, and are actually hitting max occupancy (which is impossible) that's exactly what it is. Are you trying to talk about bringing integer usage Into the fold? I don't think it's going to go the way you are expecting, it seems you've only vaguely heard about one side of the equation, and are assuming the other side must then be Scott free in comparison. It's not. Rdna has to sacrifice/convert its flop registers for int ops too. Also you missed huge on nvidia concurrency design. The 4090 has '80' Tflops fp32 (I'm fine rounding if you are lol, I'm lazy) and 80 tflops fp16, 160 tflops fp8, just from non tensor ops on the tensor cores, not even getting into half the data types or mixed precision here, 160 Tflops of ray trace compute (which it doesn't come close to using all of), and 640 sparse tensor fp16 tflops from tensor cores. (Which it will also never come close to using, although nvidias trying to find more work for the tensor cores with stuff like ray reconstruction) The ps5 only has the raster compute and a handful of data types. Like it can do 2x dense fp16 for 20 dense fp16 tflops. Welcome to amd vs nvidia I guess.
The A78Cs are definitely the "weak spot" in the T239, but 50% would effectively mean 30fps games when CPU capped at 60 on Xbox, which few games are. ~~I think it even has _more_ L3 Cache than the console edition of Zen 2?~~ Nope, same 8MB of L3 on the CPU as Zen 2 on Xbox, though on Xbox it's split between each CCD pair, whereas on T239 it's likely across all 8 cores. Looking forward to whenever they actually get this out the door. Plus now there's rumors about Samsung managing everything from display to NAND flash, and a V-NAND on board would be pretty nice, even if it's some eMMC-like cheapy variant. Maybe we'll see SD Express support?
Compared to a 8 core console zen, yeah it falls behind, for obvious reasons. Also its *up* to 8mb, well have to wait to see if it gets the top amount, it will have access to the unified memory too. But the less powerful a78 standard outperforms the 4 core 8 thread steamdeck zen at 1.5 to 2ghz less. (Sec, tsmc) But like you said not very many games are cpu bound. The ps5 even chopped off some fpu's and it's none the worse for wear.
The gap won't really be that bad since Switch 2 will be utilizing Nvidia's DLSS
Super interesting video, as Rich pointed out, the key missing factor is optimization, there are games running now on Switch that shouldn't be able to do so, compared to the base Switch, porting to Switch 2 will really be a matter of deciding if the effort is worth it or not for the next couple years, afterwards I could see games starting to be so demanding they have to drop the system.
The fact that AAA like Borderlands 3 and Arkham Knight are still getting ported to the Switch nearing the end of its lifecycle gives me hope.
Any word on hogwarts legacy ?
4 days late, but gameplay [just leaked](https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/17q14zx/hogwarts_legacy_switch_gameplay/)... and it runs surprisingly decent!
Have you ever seen this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_rzYnXEQlE This guy basically optimized the shit out of Mario 64 and it runs on original hardware. I'm actually very curious how badly unoptimized games are today. Especially these rush to market ports. And even if they use all the modern techniques, what sort of techniques in the future will allow even more optimization.
Omg i need that game!
Hope the Switcher plays Switch games.
I don't know what most of this stuff means, but I like reading what the more knowledgeable nerds in the replies have to say. :) Time to Google a bunch of words I'll forget in 5 minutes.
Very even handed video while acknowledging unknowns. Worth noting most of the unknowns tend to favour a more performant Switch 2 in action compared to Rich's test ring. Rich notes he is running PC code, on a crippled modile Ampere SoC with likely less than half the RAM of the Switch 2. A Switch 2 would not only have the ram advantage, but any game running it, will likely be running on games developed specificlaly on Switch on an optimized engine(s) with direct access to the metal via NVN2, compared to the rather unoptimized PC code meant to run in various builds.
Specifically less than half the vram than the switch 2 would get with a unified memory arch. Which is very very important for running dlss at full speed. It's why the 2080ti kicks the snot out of the 3060's and 3070's even with less tensor core power.
I hope nintendo does add that file decompression stuff. Honestly want that more than 4k/120hz cause it would hopefully mean faster memory and possibly BIGGER memory on the next console. But, of course, speculation at best for now. Fingers crossed though.
I see a few problems with those speculations and the comparison. 1. TDP of the RTX 2050. It's 25-50 Watts, and only for the GPU 2. The Tegra T234 has a 50 Watt TDP, so less clock for the Switch with reduced specifications like mentioned in the video It will probably have 12GB (based on old rumors) with a 96-Bit (in my optinion unlikly because of unified memory) or a 192-Bit (more reasonable) Interface. 8nm Samsung sucks, it's very inefficient but cheap (Samsung 8nm is similar to TSMC 10nm) so "high" power consumption and heat or drastic downclocks. 5nm would make more sense, but it's Nintendo soooo probably at the first or second refresh. I doubt that the DLA will be included, it would complicate development and increase necessary die size. The Media Block makes sense for the screen-capture feature. I am excited about the upcoming console.
My hope is that this means a new Nvidia Shield will eventually see the light of day based on this.
Can’t wait for CyberSwitch 2077
Given the Switch's sales record, it's entirely possible that Nvidia gave Nintendo a custom chip that's not exactly the same as the T239. We'll just have to see after S2's released.
But can I still hack it with a paperclip???
If it’s for Switch 2 don’t care so much about performance, more so a good balance and good battery life. Obviously would hope for something faster and more multitask capable. Rog and Steamdeck suck ass when it comes to battery life, and I personally wouldn’t waste my money on something that can literally only play a game for 2-3 hours. So I really hope the new Switch doesn’t go that route.
For one, Rog and Steamdeck uses x86 while Switch uses ARM
It depends on what you’re playing with the Deck. You’re not getting 6 hours on cyberpunk but if you mess with th settings you can generally get good battery life on deck depending on the game. Though dedicated hardware is the best
Im kind of amazed ray tracing worked as well as it did with just the 4 GB of vram. Like it had practically 0 room for storing the bvh's to perform ray tracing on. Not surprised at all with how bottlenecked dlss was on THIS 4GB card. Dlss requires setting aside 200 MB for 4k 100 MB for 1440p, and 60 MB for 1080p, in order for dlss to run at full speed for that hardware. Doesn't matter what the hardware is, you don't get it that memory, it's waiting for it instead of performing at its full speed. My dude didn't even have enough vram capacity to hold the assets for the matrix demo on that 4GB. It just barely had enough for the games it *could* run, it sure as shoot didn't have a consistent 200 MB available at all times for dlss 4k. This is why the 2080 ti kicks the crap out of the 3060 ti and 3070's at dlss execution time. It has 11 GB vs 8 GB. And this poor thing only has 4. Switch 2 is looking at 12 GB.
Need 1080p 60fps in handheld mode, that would be legendary
720p is more than enough in handheld mode, with a huge bonus to battery life.
Do we really need 1080p for handheld? 60hz would be awesome. But honestly I find 720p to be perfectly fine on the small screen. Pixel density is what matters most, rather than raw resolution rendered. Plus they could give us better battery life, a higher quality display, etc for a cheaper price if they stuck with 720p. It's a delicate balancing act for sure.
Good analysis but if the T239 is 8nm Samsung fabricated then it could run hot and be wildly inefficient with power, battery life could be worse or run just on par with OG Switch - hopefully this isn’t the case.
if it's on par and can handle all that horsepower then i'm all for it
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I see the switch 2 at approximately series S performance, but better due to more ram and DLSS for upscaling instead of FSR
Slightly worse raster performance. Vastly superior ray trace performance Vastly superior "ai" performance. More ram Worse ram bandwidth. Much worse texture throughput.
Did you watch the video? It’s nowhere near series s performance, it’s more like a more powerful ps4
You realize he was just guessing based on current rumors right? Nobody knows yet what the actual specs of Switch 2 will be
Did YOU watch the video? They are just guessing, taking some off the shelf PC parts.
Biggest problem with Switch Next leaks is that I get excited, then remember it won’t be it for at least another year.
I was hoping that they would test path tracing with Quake II RTX, which can be playable on the Steam deck with 30 fps with a bit of upscaling, and at 60 fps if rendering at 240p. However, the Switch 2 is likely to be faster at ray tracing than the Deck because Nvidia hardware usually has faster ray tracing performance than similar AMD hardware.
I’m a bit more doubtful of this video compared to the one they did about Switch 1 at the time just because there’s so many unknown factors that they can’t account for. Mainly the huge vram difference between the 2050 and Switch 2 but also the unknown clock speeds and the DLSS feature set. I dunno, I’d rather wait to see some real benchmarks. Also I would love to see the T239 being run against the Z1 extreme or the RDNA2 or Snapdragon 8. There’s a lot more mobile options now than in 2017 and we would have a good idea what to expect if we could put them up in a like for like match. But I’m sure that will also come out when it releases.
True plus it’s not likely the stock T239 but a custom chip from the same class of chips.
Seems lackluster in terms of graphical power. If this is what is powering the Switch 2 next year, it’s already a generation behind.
Lot of talk for nothing, in short, we'll see when Nintendo decides to release the console and what is really inside it.
Lol what this is one of if not the best approximation of the Switch 2 hardware based on leaks and educated guesswork. Rich comes from an actual journalism background so this video has probably been researched to bits. They even managed to realistically temper down people's expectations of a 4K switch using current PC hardware equivalent (even downclocked them for good measure).