Switch 2’s reveal: what have we learned about its next-gen potential?

DF Direct Weekly arrives early – but with good cause. With Nintendo finally revealing the Switch 2, the Digital Foundry team spends a good hour discussing what we’ve learned from the two minute teaser and, equally, what is still to be revealed. The key question I’ve been thinking about is this: did we see a proper generational leap from the Mario Kart demo we saw compared to the existing Switch’s Mario Kart 8 Deluxe? In fact, did we see any hint of the advanced Nvidia technologies that have commanded so much of the Switch 2 discourse? I’d argue not.

What the teaser did do was to confirm the multitude of hardware-based leaks we’ve seen over the last couple of months. Yes, Switch 2 will be significantly larger than its predecessor. The joycons do appear to attach magnetically to the main unit. There are strong hints that while the IR facilities from Switch 1 are gone, some kind of sensor allows for its successor to use its controllers like mice. Top and bottom USB-C connectors are also confirmed, opening the door to a range of external peripherals that could be mounted to the top of the machine. As well as the bigger form factor, ventilation seems to have been improved to handle the heat generated by the T239 processor.

Backwards compatibility of both physical and digital Switch titles is also confirmed – presented with caveats suggesting that not all games will work. My gut feeling here is that outside of a few outliers, software compatibility won’t be a problem – it’s more likely to be games using Switch 1’s unique hardware features that will have issues. Will games naturally run faster on Switch 2 than they do on the older model? I’d suggest that producing entirely accurate emulation of the older console would be more difficult than simply running them flat-out by running older games through the new hardware, similar to the way PS5 and Xbox Series back compat functions.

• 0:00:00 Introduction
• 0:01:12 Switch 2 hardware
• 0:16:42 New Mario Kart analysis
• 0:28:32 Only partial backwards compatibility?
• 0:36:44 Rumoured Switch 2 clock speeds
• 0:47:52 Supporter Q1: Can Switch 2 use transformer model DLSS?
• 0:50:32 Supporter Q2: Can DLSS salvage Switch 2’s output on 4K screens?
• 0:52:19 Supporter Q3: Will Nintendo release performance patches for Switch 1 games on Switch 2?
• 0:58:21 Final Switch 2 thoughts and impressions

For those keeping track of the hardware leaks and general discourse, nothing I’ve mentioned so far will be ‘new’ as such – but the reveal of what we can assume to be a new Mario Kart game certainly is. There are clear enhancements here over what we saw in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – but with the huge caveat that all we can really discuss is a very short video clip that may or may not be representative of the wider game. Even so, the nature of the track itself was interesting: we see wider terrain with a relatively detail-rich shot panning back to show a considerable draw distance – which may well hint at a different approach for the game itself.

Character rendering and environments have a similar style to Mario Kart 8 but there are some interesting embellishments. There are changes to the character models, perhaps to more closely align with the movie versions. The drivers – and indeed the karts themselves – look more expressive, including cartoon-inspired squashing and stretching animations. Also interesting is the shift to shadow maps. In Mario Kart 8, baked-in shadows combined with sparing use of the shadow maps but here, all geometry appears to sport real-time shadow maps – a significant improvement over Switch 1, but obviously more demanding on GPU resources.

Is this a generational leap over the existing hardware? It’s hard to come away with that impression to the point where there are good arguments that this new Mario Kart could have been designed as a cross-gen game in the style of Forza Horizon 5: good-looking on both systems, created with balance in mind for a good experience across the generations. While Switch 2 possesses ray tracing capabilities, perhaps it’s a bit much to ask them to manifest in a 60fps game, but it is surprising to see so few of Nvidia’s technologies in play.

For example, DLSS has been lauded as a potential game-changer for the new console and yet there’s no evidence whatsoever that it’s in place in this new Mario Kart game. In fact, in common with many other Nintendo titles, the nature of the footage suggests there is no anti-aliasing at all, let alone ML-based upscaling. It’s all a far cry from last year’s reports of Breath of the Wild running at 4K 60fps using DLSS! In short, all we really have is a teaser for a crowd-pleasing game but hardly a next generation showcase for Nintendo’s new hardware.

Not quite relevant to the reveal, but certainly Switch 2-adjacent was the leak earlier this week of purported clock speeds for the T239 processor in both handheld and docked configurations. Think of this as the ‘next gen’ version of our 2016 story on how Nintendo downclocked Tegra X1 from default specs. The mooted specs have concerned some onlookers but they are broadly in line with what I expected – with a few caveats in place.

The table below outlines the basics. Just like the Switch 1 clocks I reported on just over eight years ago now, we get CPU, GPU and memory clock speeds. When docked, we get the projected 102.4GB/s of memory bandwidth, shared between a GPU running at 1007MHz and a CPU clocked at a bafflingly low 998.4MHz. In the power constrained environment where battery life is king, things change – the GPU drops to 561MHz, while memory bandwidth reduces to 68.3GB/s. Bizarrely, however, the CPU clock increases from 998.4MHz to 1100.8MHz. Quite why this is the case is not within the leaked documentation and it’s certainly enough to cast doubt on the veracity of the report.

* Switch 2 specifications remain unconfirmed at this time.

With that said, the precise nature of the frequencies – down to the decimal point – is certainly reminiscent of the developer documentation that informed our Switch 1 story, while the numbers of GPU and memory clocks are certainly plausible bearing in mind the scant information pieced together about the T239 processor. Just like its predecessor, the clocks are lower than many expected – but entirely in line with some of the limitations put in place by a chip that isn’t fabricated on a modern process node.

Why would handheld mode require higher clockspeeds than docked? That’s completely unknown at this time, but weirdly and perversely, this actually adds to the idea that the information may be on the level. Why create eminently plausible and believable data for the GPU and memory and then fumble the ball with ‘obviously wrong’ CPU frequencies? You have to balance that idea up against the notion that Nintendo has some reason for doing what it’s doing with the CPU clocks. Alternatively, of course, the leak may simply be incorrect.

As for what this new information actually means, let’s factor out the CPU for the moment and look at the GPU. A while back, I put together a video based on everything we know about the T239 chip in Switch 2. I attempted to simulate the GPU by using a downclocked RTX 2050 laptop processor, based on the same Nvidia Ampere architecture and operating with similar memory bandwidth. This chip has 2048 CUDA cores – more than the 1536 in T239 – so I ran it at just 750MHz. On balance this should be ballpark with a smaller GPU running at higher clocks, as described here. A broadly Steam Deck-like experience ensues but limited ray tracing is on the table, while DLSS is good for 1080p – and in some scenarios – 1440p upscaling.

All of that testing remains firmly in theoretical simulation territory – and it’s notable that we didn’t see much of this potential in the Mario Kart footage. It’s almost as if – for now, at least – Nintendo doesn’t want to show its hand in terms of what the machine is capable of. By showing just a few seconds of a new Mario Kart title, it seems that the platform holder has other ideas – perhaps to remind the 64m people who bought Mario Kart 8 Deluxe what a good time they had playing it and that a sequel is on the way.

So, with a teaser reveal out of the way, what happens next? All eyes are on the Switch 2 Nintendo Direct, coming on April 4th. It’s a long wait for sure, just as it was between the original Switch reveal in October 2016 and the events that took place in January 2017. In the meantime, it looks as though it’s weapons-free for developers and publishers to talk about the Switch 2 games they’re working on, but probably not to show any footage.

If I was to predict what we’ll see beyond whatever surprises Nintendo may be cooking up from its first-party studios, well, I’d expect a lot of PS4 ports and PS4/PS5 cross-gen games to appear. There are rumours that the likes of Microsoft Flight Simulator may be coming, which would certainly be a challenge for this hardware, but the 2020 version ran well enough on Steam Deck and if we can disregard CPU concerns for now, typically I’d expect anything that runs on Deck to run on Switch 2 – and lower resolution aside, I managed to run Flight Sim at close to Series S settings on the Valve handheld. Perhaps expectations need to be kept in check, but based on the remarkably good Switch ports we saw across its lifecycle, I’m confident we’ll continue to be surprised by Nintendo’s hybrid console as we shift into the concept’s second generation.