Update: Nintendo has officially confirmed via a statement that the Switch 2 only supports VRR in handheld mode. A Nintendo spokesperson shared this information with the folks over at Nintendo Life. The brand removed the mentions of VRR in docked mode from its official website, and confirmed the same via a statement with an apology for the confusion. More details about its processor are in the original post below.
It’s no secret that the Nintendo Switch 2 will be a major step up in performance, but what’s actually under the hood? Nintendo’s official specs sheet says it has a “custom processor made by Nvidia,” but what exactly is this new chip and what can we expect from it? A recent deep dive from Digital Foundry sheds light on the hardware powering Nintendo’s next-gen console. Hit the jump for more details and a quick side-by-side comparison of the original Switch and the Switch 2’s specifications.
Nitendo Switch 2 specifications confirmed
According to the folks at Digital Foundry, the new NVIDIA chip at the heart of the Switch 2 is called “T239” and is said to be custom built specifically for the new handheld. As far as the CPU specs of this chip are concerned, the architecture here is made up of eight ARM Cortex A78C cores running the ARMv8 64-bit instruction set with cryptography extensions enabled. Nintendo is reserving two of these for OS features while leaving the rest open for the developers to work with. In comparison, the original Switch had four ARM Cortex A57 cores out of which only one was reserved for the OS.
The CPU runs at 1,100MHz in handheld mode while – rather mysteriously – dropping to 998MHz when switching over to performance modes i.e. when docked. The chip is reportedly capable of reaching a maximum clock speed of 1.7GHz, suggesting there’s untapped potential that Nintendo might explore later in the future or perhaps when they decide to make a different version of the console.
As far as the graphics side of things are concerned, the Switch 2 utilizes NVIDIA’s Ampere architecture, and is confirmed to have 1,536 CUDA cores, up from 256 on the original Switch. The GPU clock is said to top out at 1.4GHz, which is also a modest improvement over the Tegra X1’s 921MHz speed. Notably, the Switch 2 is also confirmed to have two 6GB memory modules for a total of 12GB of LPDDR5X, and the bandwidth is confirmed at 102GB/s in docked mode versus 68GB/s when running in handheld mode.
Here’s a side-by-side comparison to see how the new and improved chip in the Switch 2 stacks up against the outgoing model:
| Specification | Switch 2: NVIDIA T239 | Switch 1: NVIDIA Tegra X1 |
| CPU Architecture | 8x ARM Cortex A78C | 4x ARM Cortex A57 |
| CPU Clocks | 998MHz (docked), 1101MHz (mobile), Max 1.7GHz | 1020 MHz (docked/mobile), Max 1.785GHz |
| CPU System Reservation | 2 cores (6 available to developers) | 1 core (3 available to developers) |
| GPU Architecture | Ampere | Maxwell |
| CUDA Cores | 1536 | 256 |
| GPU Clocks | 1007MHz (docked), 561MHz (mobile), Max 1.4GHz | 768MHz (docked), up to 460MHz (mobile), Max 921MHz |
| Memory/Interface | 128-bit/LPDDR5 | 64-bit/LPDDR4 |
| Memory Bandwidth | 102GB/s (docked), 68GB/s (mobile) | 25.6GB/s (docked), 21.3GB/s (mobile) |
| Memory System Reservation | 3GB (9GB available for games) | 0.8GB (3.2GB available for games) |
The spec comparison highlighted above should give you an idea of the the kind of performance jump one can expect to see from the upgraded handheld. It’ll be interesting to see how these specifications on paper translate over to the real-world performance. Also, these are the technical specifications of the new NVIDIA chip inside the Switch 2, not the console itself. You can head over to Nintendo’s official site right here to get more details of the Switch 2 or catch up on details at our Switch 2 hub.
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