Nintendo has been tight-lipped about the full nature of the Switch 2 internals with just three weeks to go until the console goes on sale.
However, the excellent Digital Foundry website reckons it has “rock solid” information on a spec sheer that reveals much more about the Switch 2’s processor.
Nintendo will only speak of a “Custom processor made by Nvidia” under GPU/CPU section of its official spec sheet, while Nvidia recently confirmed it’ll have ray-tracking support and DLSS upscaling.
Digital Foundry now says it can confirm the SoC is a custom Nvidia T239 chip that is built on an eight-core ARM Cortex A78C CPU. Two of those cores are reserved for system use, while six of them can be utilised by games.
The max clock speed is 1.7GHz (the figure it can be pushed to if need’s be). However, the chip’s regular performance will see the T239 run at 1100MHz (mobile) and 998MHz (docked). That’s somewhat odd considering the docked mode commonly is where Nintendo allows the system to work harder because it’s less concerned about battery life.
Graphics-wise we’re looking at a chip made using Nvidia’s Ampere architecture from the RTX 30 series GPUs. There’s a max clock speed of 1.4GHz. Below that the GPU runs at 561MHz (handheld) and 1007MHz (docked). It’s capable of hitting 3.072 TFLOPs in docked mode, the report says.
Furthermore, the Switch 2 will offer 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM with 9GB available to developers to maximise. That’s 3x the 4GB of memory offered on the old console. Bandwidth is listed by Digital Foundry as 102GB/s (docked) and 68GB/s (mobile).
Finally, the report has information on Nintendo’s new GameChat feature that gamers can use to commune and appear on camera during gaming sessions. Be prepared for it to give the console a performance hit because GameChat will have “a significant impact on system resources,” the report says.
How all of this affects performance of the best Switch 2 games remains to be seen.
Opinion
The vast majority of Switch 2 gamers won’t give a monkey’s about all of this stuff. Nintendo hasn’t engaged in the specs arms race for generations.
I can’t think of many people who wouldn’t buy a Switch 2 because the clock speed fell a few MHz short of expectations. You know Nintendo’s offerings are going to run just fine.
However, with the company now offering some resource-hungry games like Cyberpunk 2077, this might be a bit more significant to a wider range of gamers.
