Nintendo’s Switch 2 spec page is pretty vague when it comes to the real meat and juice of the upcoming console. Thankfully, the internet has done its homework and supplied a deeper dive into the hardware and what you can expect from the console from a performance perspective.

Digital Foundry gave us a great breakdown of the console. The platform compiled quite a detailed report on the console based on all the recent leaks, the teardown of the motherboard, and of course, information from Nintendo and NVIDIA.

The report says that the Switch 2 includes a custom NVIDIA ARM Cortex A78C chipset running the ARMV8 64-bit instruction set. The SoC has 64K of L1 instruction cache and 64K of L1 data cache. Each of the eight cores has 256K of L2 cache, and all cores can share the 4MB of L3 cache.

The Switch 2 includes a 998MHz docked CPU clock and a 1101MHz mobile clock. It can max out at 1.7GHz. Two of the CPU cores are reserved for the system, and six cores are available to developers for games. The GPU comes with 1536 CUDA cores, a 1007MHz docked clock frequency, 561MHz mobile clock frequency, and a max 1.4GHz clock speed.

The system includes 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM. 3GB of this RAM is used for the system, and 9GB for games. The Switch 2’s memory bandwidth is 102GB/s docked and 68GB/s in handheld.

All this shows that the system not only has some beefy internals but the out-of-the-box performance of the Switch 2 is capped to a certain degree. Both the GPU and CPU can reach much higher frequencies than what they run at, so I suspect Nintendo might increase these later down the line for future game development.

We also don’t know if the max clock speeds of the CPU and GPU are being hit in certain scenarios. The original Switch console down-clocked the GPU during game loading and increased the CPU in order to speed up memory transfer and loading times. This could also be the case on the Switch 2. Regardless, the console runs a bit lower than the actual performance cap on both the CPU and GPU front.

The Switch 2 can produce 3.072 TFLOPS in docked mode and 1.71 TFLOPS in handheld mode. The report says that comparing this performance to another console is kind of pointless at this rate. We’ll have to see how games hold up instead.

Digital Foundry has confirmed that the Nintendo Switch 2 doesn’t have VRR support when docked. The console’s handheld mode does deliver a 7.9-inch 1080p display with HDR and VRR. The display can reach a frame rate of 120Hz and with VRR, developers will be able to make use of high frame rate modes similar to the 40Hz modes we see on PS5 games.

The report does cite Game Chat as a cause for concern on the Switch 2. The report claims that Nintendo’s new social feature might have a significant strain on the console’s hardware given how resource-heavy the software is. We don’t know yet just how taxing the feature is or whether or not developers can decide to disable it completely in order to unlock more console performance.

Game Chat is likely why the 3GB of RAM has been allocated to the system operations. The NVIDIA Tegra chip is, of course, also doing the work there, but it is too early to tell what impact it has on game performance.

Source: Eurogamer

Original article on GLITCHED

Written by Marco Cocomello