Switching Up the Gaming Industry

The rumor mill is in full swing as talk of a Nintendo Switch 2 circulates about message boards and office water coolers around the world. Nintendo has a reputation for being very tight-lipped about new product launches, and this case is no exception, so whether there is any truth behind these rumors, or if they are pure speculation is up in the air. In fact, Nintendo has not even announced that a next generation Switch is on the way yet. But with the current hardware already being six years old — well, they must be up to something, right?

Of course many of the discussions about a successor to the switch are focused on the hardware. We all want to know what sort of performance this new console (if it is real, that is) will be capable of. The current Switch is based on NVIDIA’s Tegra series ​​system on a chip, which combines a powerful Arm CPU and an NVIDIA GPU in a single package. This platform has been wildly successful for Nintendo to date, so it seems reasonable to assume that they would be inclined to stick with NVIDIA hardware in the future. When you have a good thing going, why rock the boat?

But naturally, six years after the Switch's release, that hardware is due for a big upgrade. So what could that look like? YouTuber Austin Evans’ answer to this question is probably about as good as anyone’s at this point — that is to say, plausible, but far from certain. Evans speculates that a Switch 2 is likely to be powered by something similar to the super powerful NVIDIA Jetson Orin Module that was released last year.

This tiny powerhouse offers up to 275 trillion operations per second of processing power, which is eight times the performance of the previous generation modules, and does so on a small power budget that is handheld console friendly. To see what this platform is capable of, Evans bought a Jetson Orin NX Developer Kit, which just might look something like a future Switch 2 development kit.

After unboxing and setting up the Orin NX, Evans found that while NVIDIA’s JetPack environment is perfectly suited for developing AI applications, it was certainly not designed with gaming in mind. This made it a challenge to get many of the common benchmarking tools up and running, but some impressive results were seen with the limited analysis that could be accomplished on the platform.

To get some more concrete idea about the level of gaming performance that this system might have, a Windows PC was built and tuned to have very similar performance to the metrics that were found on the Jetson Orin NX. This included an eight-core AMD Ryzen 7 2700X underclocked to 2.25 GHz and an NVIDIA GTX 1650 GPU, also underclocked.

At this point we have a system that is all but certain to be nothing like the actual hardware of a Switch 2, but it does pretty closely match the performance of the Orin NX benchmarks, so it is pretty reasonable to run some benchmarks to see what type of performance new Nintendo hardware may (or may not) be capable of.

Several games including Witcher 3, Apex Legends, and Fortnite were all tested out on the Windows PC and the current Nintendo Switch. In each case, the PC version of the game had a noticeably higher level of graphic detail and ran at a higher frame rate.

These findings were definitely a step up from the current hardware, but maybe not a big enough leap for a new console. Evans suggests that the rumors about Nintendo eyeing the top-of-the-line hardware in the NVIDIA Orin AGX module for a Switch 2 might be closer to the real truth, as this would make for more of a quantum leap in gameplay performance.

This project was a fun experiment showing us what might be, but it is still all educated guesses at this point. Until Nintendo comes forward with more information, it looks like the rumors will continue to fly.