Rumors Suggest You Might Want to Leave the Switch 2 Docked
We’ve learned a lot about the Switch 2 since Nintendo announced it in January . We know how the core specs compare on paper to the original Switch ; we know that many of the physical game cartridges won’t actually have games ; and we know what games to expect this year . While there’s still a lot to learn about the console before its official launch next month , some new leaks have provided fresh insights into how the Switch 2 actually performs.
Digital Foundry reports that it can finally confirm the leaks surrounding the Switch 2 hardware, answering many of the remaining questions that Nintendo and Nvidia have left in the dark so far. The publication highlights the key hardware upgrades for the company’s new console and explains how there are some significant performance improvements, especially in docked mode.
The Switch 2 is more powerful, especially when docked.
Digital Foundry points out that Nintendo calls the SoC (system on a chip) in both the Switch 2 and the OG Switch “custom,” but notes that the original Switch’s SoC was actually a “vanilla” chip. The Switch 2’s hardware, on the other hand, is truly tailored specifically for Nintendo’s console. That means it should be better optimized for the company’s unique situation of offering console-quality gaming that can be adapted to handheld mode.
Nvidia’s new custom T239 graphics card features an eight-core ARM Cortext A87C processor, compared to the Switch 1’s quad-core ARM Cortext A57. Digital Foundry reports that the original Switch reserved one processor core for operating system functions and left the other three open to developers, while the Switch 2 reserves six of its cores for developers and uses two for OS tasks.
The CPU specs are still unclear: the original Switch had a fixed CPU clock speed (CPU processing speed) of 1020 MHz, regardless of whether it was docked or in handheld mode. The new Switch runs at 1101 MHz in handheld mode, but 998 MHz when docked. Digital Foundry isn’t sure why this is, though it speculates it has something to do with memory bandwidth drops, which could impact CPU performance. The maximum theoretical clock speed here is 1.7 GHz, compared to 1.785 GHz on the Switch.
The GPU specs make more sense at this point. The new Ampere GPU has a typical clock speed of 1,007 MHz when docked and 561 MHz in portable mode, with a maximum clock speed of 1.4 GHz. The original Maxwell Switch GPU ran at 768 MHz when docked and up to 460 MHz in portable mode, with a maximum clock speed of 921 MHz. An important metric to look at is TFLOPS, which measures the speed of a GPU’s performance. When docked, the Switch 2’s GPU is rated for 3,072 TFLOPs, but drops to 1.71 TFLOPs in portable mode. Digital Foundry points out that you can’t necessarily judge a GPU’s potential by TFLOPs alone, and that it’s up to developers to show us how well games can run.
We already knew that the Switch 2 offers 12GB of RAM (102GB/s when docked, 68GB/s when in handheld mode). Now, Digital Foundry says it can confirm how Nintendo is allocating that memory: The OS uses 3GB of RAM, leaving 9GB for running games. That’s a stark comparison to the Switch 1, which only came with 4GB of RAM, of which 3.2GB was allocated to developers. That means the Switch 2 nearly triples the amount of memory that game makers can use.
GameChat is consuming a lot of resources
GameChat is one of Nintendo’s “big” new features for the Switch 2. Coming just 22 years after Xbox Live popularized online chat on the console, the feature offers in-game social features like audio and video chat, as well as screen sharing. However, it appears that innovation comes at the cost of performance.
Digital Foundry claims that GameChat impacts system resources to such an extent that Nintendo offers developers a “Game Chat testing tool.” This tool reproduces the resources that Game Chat consumes while running, so developers can understand how it might impact their games without having to run Game Chat itself during development.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s watched the Nintendo Switch 2 demos. Game Chat looks choppy , especially when screen sharing or making video calls. (Is that 5 frames per second?) I suppose it’s nice to see Nintendo being so open about how laggy these features are, but the fact that it looks so bad in the official ad doesn’t bode well for Game Chat’s real-world performance.
We’ll have to wait for games to really see what the Switch 2 can do.
On paper, the Switch 2 has a big performance advantage when docked. We already knew that the Switch 2 can output 4K 60fps and 1440p 120fps in docked mode, compared to 1080p 120fps in portable mode. So it makes sense that the Switch 2 would have an active cooling fan built into the dock to support that higher performance. (The Switch 1 doesn’t have a fan in the dock, though it can output higher resolutions in docked mode than in portable mode.)
However, we’ll have to see how the performance translates into real-world use. As with any hardware, paper specs can only tell you so much. The real test is how developers can optimize and push that hardware with their software. If developers can take advantage of the Switch 2’s more advanced hardware to deliver more impressive graphics and performance, we’ll naturally see that for ourselves in gameplay. For now, it’s a waiting game.