TL;DR: 12GB of RAM, GPU that’s roughly on par with the Steam Deck. It’s not the most powerful handheld out there but surprisingly not bad for Nintendo standards.
I wonder if they’ve fallen into the same trap with not making the console powerful enough. The first switch was also not that powerful when it came out, and it’s really struggled in the end of its lifecycle. A lot of first party releases in the last couple years run like complete shit. They probably missed an opportunity here to stash an eGPU in the dock to provide a more modern experience while playing on the big screen.
…when comparing TFLOPs, and that’s not comparable across architectures (by different companies as well!).
If we take similar-performing (in rasterization) Ampere and RDNA 2 cards (say a 3080 and 6800 XT), we can see the 3080 has 29.77 TFLOPs and the 6800 XT has 20.74 TFLOPs, an RDNA 2 FLOP is worth about 1.4x as much as an Ampere FLOP.
So extrapolating the 1.6 “RDNA 2 TFLOPs” of the Deck we get 2.24 “Ampere TFLOPs” and that’d make the Deck quite a bit faster than the Switch 2 in portable mode, but slower than the Switch 2 in docked mode.
This is obviously all just wild and silly speculation, but I doubt the Switch 2 will match the Deck in portable mode. Samsung 8nm would just eat too much power for this to realistically happen in a handheld form factor.
Especially considering it has access to DLSS, I‘m looking forward to see what Nintendo‘s first party studios can cook up with these specs. But I‘m waiting for the OLED model sometime in the future.
Interesting, since we now know the size I would not have expected it to be on-par roughly with the Deck while being so much thinner and a bit smaller. Hrm.
Was kinda hoping for specs. I like the design upgrade, though.
Much like the rest of the announcement, the specs actually got leaked a few days earlier: https://thegamepost.com/nintendo-switch-2-full-specs-appears-to-have-leaked/
TL;DR: 12GB of RAM, GPU that’s roughly on par with the Steam Deck. It’s not the most powerful handheld out there but surprisingly not bad for Nintendo standards.
I wonder if they’ve fallen into the same trap with not making the console powerful enough. The first switch was also not that powerful when it came out, and it’s really struggled in the end of its lifecycle. A lot of first party releases in the last couple years run like complete shit. They probably missed an opportunity here to stash an eGPU in the dock to provide a more modern experience while playing on the big screen.
…when comparing TFLOPs, and that’s not comparable across architectures (by different companies as well!).
If we take similar-performing (in rasterization) Ampere and RDNA 2 cards (say a 3080 and 6800 XT), we can see the 3080 has 29.77 TFLOPs and the 6800 XT has 20.74 TFLOPs, an RDNA 2 FLOP is worth about 1.4x as much as an Ampere FLOP.
So extrapolating the 1.6 “RDNA 2 TFLOPs” of the Deck we get 2.24 “Ampere TFLOPs” and that’d make the Deck quite a bit faster than the Switch 2 in portable mode, but slower than the Switch 2 in docked mode.
This is obviously all just wild and silly speculation, but I doubt the Switch 2 will match the Deck in portable mode. Samsung 8nm would just eat too much power for this to realistically happen in a handheld form factor.
Especially considering it has access to DLSS, I‘m looking forward to see what Nintendo‘s first party studios can cook up with these specs. But I‘m waiting for the OLED model sometime in the future.
No wonder they successfully stopped ongoing development of switch emulation on steam deck.
Wow, Nintendo really stepped up the game here.
Interesting, since we now know the size I would not have expected it to be on-par roughly with the Deck while being so much thinner and a bit smaller. Hrm.