Nintendo is gearing up for the release of its new home console, while gamers who are a bit of a hardware fan are wondering which graphics card to compare it to.
Having made the Switch console last as long as possible despite a fairly outdated hardware configuration, Nintendo has now decided to upgrade its machine. The Switch 2 was unveiled a short while ago and, more importantly, the Japanese firm took advantage of this announcement to confirm the console's release date: the Switch 2 should therefore enjoy a worldwide release, as early as June 5... even if uncertainty remains around the launch in the United States due to the trade war started by President Donald Trump.
VideoCardz
However, this trade war is unlikely to affect distribution of the console in the rest of the world, and particularly in Europe. In fact, Nintendo's potential European customers are asking a lot of questions about the console's power and, more specifically, its graphics power, even though the Japanese firm is not known for "video-game overkill": as we said, the Switch 1 was already quite a bit behind Sony and Microsoft's PlayStation and Xbox consoles. Well, there's no question of overturning the order of things with the Switch 2. Of course, the machine will be significantly more powerful than the previous version, but there's no question of it competing with the PlayStation 5 Pro or even the Xbox Series X.
VideoCardz
The VideoCardz website relays several sources to tell us that Nintendo has worked with NVIDIA, which produces the T239 chip at the heart of the Switch 2. This SoC chip covers an area of 207 mm² and integrates a total of 1,536 CUDA cores, the computing units used by NVIDIA. This kind of power should take the Switch 2 a long way, but it's only a tiny fraction of what you'll find in the PC world. So, while the T239 is a sort of variation of the GA10F GPU used by NVIDIA on its GeForce GTX 2050 graphics card, this variation featured 2048 CUDA cores, 64 texture units (up from 48), 32 ROPs (up from 16) and 64 Tensor cores (up from 48). The T239 also sees its L1 cache halved, while the L2 cache is reduced by a factor of 4.
All these elements lead Geekerwan - on Youtube - to envisage a much lower performance for the Switch 2 than for this GeForce GTX 2050, while bearing in mind that NVIDIA will still be able to take advantage of DLSS: the source of a great deal of information about the Switch 2, the Youtuber has managed to get his hands on a - non-functional - motherboard for the console. Although the board doesn't boot up, it's virtually complete and most of the components can be identified. After studying NVIDIA's T239 chip in detail, Geekerwan even estimates that its power would be close to that of a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti when the console is on its dock, and a GeForce GTX 750 Ti in portable mode. Clearly, there's nothing revolutionary about the Switch 2's power, even if we're talking about a 7 to 7.5-fold increase over the Switch 1's NVIDIA Tegra X1.
