Nintendo Switch 2 is talking about it! Information leaks, Nvidia… we take stock

Goodbye Super Nintendo Switch Pro, welcome to Nintendo Switch 2!

With Nintendo, it’s always difficult to separate things and disentangle the true from the false. Remember the months before the announcement of Nintendo Switch, the Japanese firm remained in theone of the biggest failures in its history with Wii Uthis console that no one understood, not even the vast majority of 101.63 million Wii owners who thought it was just an optional accessory for the star console of the time.

In the end, between its release on November 18, 2012 and the Switch release in March 2017, Nintendo will have only sold 13.56 million Wii U, 8 times less than its older sister the Wii. An obvious marketing and commercial error due to a completely misunderstood name and concept. But what would this console have been like if it had been called the Wii 2? Unfortunately, we’ll never know…

All this to say that with Nintendo, more than with anyone else, you have to be careful with everything that comes out on the network. Because our Japanese friends are champions at covering things up! Remember the Nintendo Dolphin, in the late 90s, early 2000s, some of whom could have sworn they saw prototypes spinning, only to end up being the (or whatever) GameCube that came out of the closet with the heavy duty (already) succeeds the N64.

More recently, we could have bet that the console that would make the failure of the Wii U forget would be the Nintendo NX before the increasingly insistent rumors spoke of a possible revolutionary hybrid console… The Nintendo Switch was born!

The “famous” Nintendo Dolphin

Since its launch and its unrelenting success, rumors have swirled about who will take over, and after a Switch Lite and a Switch OLED, the question on everyone’s lips is, “Will we be entitled to a Nintendo Switch Pro?” We’ve even heard of “Super Nintendo Switch Pro”, but really, if Nintendo is obviously working on a new model, it seems that we are simply moving towards a Nintendo Switch 2, so as not to repeat the mistakes of the past and ride the wave.

Nvidia and Nintendo work hand in hand for the development of Switch 2

One of the main criticisms (if not THE) that can be leveled at the Switch in hindsight is clearly its lack of power., which prevents it from competing with machines from Sony and Microsoft, even though Nintendo claims everywhere that they don’t fit into the same category and that concept is more important than power. To which we want to answer, “yes, but…”.

If a Zelda Breath of the Wild could, at the time, let’s hope for great things, 5 years after its release, few games have been able to technically match Nintendo’s masterpiece and it is not always the bad will of the developers that is to blame. Yes, the Nintendo Switch is a great console with an amazing concept, but today it is too limited and we must seriously consider the sequel.

Because if the concept of the Nintendo Switch 2 should not evolve too much, it is in its entrails that we will have to see the main changes and in particular on the side of the famous Tegra X1 chip supplied by Nvidia that already dates back to 2015, an eternity in this place.

Unlike PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series, which work much like a PC, with a motherboard, processor, and graphics card (both with AMD chips), Switch is more like a smartphone or tablet and uses a ARM-like architecture in conjunction with its archrival Nvidia.

The interest of an ARM SoC lies in the fact that it can concentrate the microprocessor, the graphics chip and all the necessary controllers on a single chip. This saves a lot of space and consumption is better controlled. That is why our smartphones, our tablets or the Switch use this type of architecture.

Did an Nvidia employee divulge sensitive information about the Nintendo Switch 2?

The first rumors about the chip that will equip the Nintendo Switch 2 date back to last year and speak of a Tegra 239 SoCa custom version of the Tegra 234 Orin especially for Nintendo and its new machine.

In all probability, this chip would incorporate 8 ARM Cortex A78C CPU cores, as well as an Ampere graphics chip (GPU), the same one found in the RTX 3000 graphics cards (ranging from 3050 to 3090 Ti). Enough to quietly consider playing the game in 4K at 60 FPS thanks to a long-awaited feature, Nvidia’s famous DLSS version 2.2.

For those who are not yet familiar with DLSS, it is a technology developed by Nvidia and very popular on PC, since it allows, thanks to artificial intelligence, to significantly improve game performance for the most modest configurations.

Specifically, and without going into technical details, this allows you to play and display a 4K image while the game “only” runs in Full HD (1080p). So we talk about scaling. The game is then more beautiful and fluid and at the cost, sometimes, of a slight blur in the objects but imperceptible to our eyes in the heat of the action, especially since the release of DLSS 2.0 (here we would have the right to a 2.2 version) . For information, if you have followed the announcements of the upcoming RTX 4000 cards, these will be entitled to the new DLSS 3.0.

Another novelty expected and provided by the Tegra 239 chip, Ray tracing would also appear, bringing Nintendo full force into the “next generation”. As a reminder, Ray Tracing is this rather greedy technology that realistically calculates visible and invisible light rays. It thus allows realistic and dynamic lighting, everything that is not offered, for example, by a Legendary Pokémon: Arceus, to name only him…

And if today we talk about it with such insistence and precision, it is because the rumor took on a new dimension after an email, obviously sent by mistake, from an Nvidia employee reached Kernel.org.

If all these rumors are especially exciting, one last one makes us salivate even more, this one no longer talks about an Ampere architecture for the graphics part, but around Ada Lovelace, the one found in the latest RTX 4000…

In any case, no announcement is planned before the end of the first half of 2023 and therefore no launch will be considered before the fall of 2023 or even the first quarter of 2024, 7 years after the launch of Nintendo Switch. 7 years is the “classic” rhythm between two generations of consoles, we are in the nails!

Buy the Nintendo Switch OLED console at €311 on Amazon