Thursday, March 25th 2021
Next-Generation Nintendo Switch SoC to be Powered by NVIDIA's Ada Lovelace GPU Architecture
Nintendo's Switch console is one of the most successful consoles ever made by the Japanese company. It has sold in millions of units and has received great feedback from the gaming community. However, as the hardware inside the console becomes outdated, the company is thinking about launching a new revision of the console, with the latest hardware and technologies. Today, we got ahold of information about the graphics side of things in Nintendo's upcoming console. Powered by NVIDIA Tegra SoC, it will incorporate unknown Arm-based CPU cores. The latest rumors suggest that the CPU will be accommodated with NVIDIA's Ada Lovelace GPU architecture. According to @kopite7kimi, a known hardware leaker, who simply replied to VideoCardz's tweet with "Ada", we are going to see the appearance of Ada Lovelace GPU architecture in the new SoC. Additionally, the new Switch SoC will have hardware accelerated NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and 4K output.
Source:
VideoCardz
33 Comments on Next-Generation Nintendo Switch SoC to be Powered by NVIDIA's Ada Lovelace GPU Architecture
And yes fix joycon drift
The Switch CPU is pretty far behind smartphones, particularly those from Apple. It's based on the 2014 A57 architecture which was ARM's first stock 64 bit design (...) So if you have a 2016 phone or beyond, you can expect about 2-3x the CPU performance [he was talking about late 2017]. There just isn't any competition here, the Switch gets smoked in the CPU department.
The GPU side of things is a little more forgiving. The Maxwell based GPU inside Tegra X1 was and still is rather unique in the mobile space, as it's the same exact architecture Nvidia uses in their PC gaming cards. [The Switch GPU is half of a GTX 750, also from 2014]. The GPU was way ahead of anything else that was available in mobile chips at the time it released in 2015. By 2016 the gap narrowed significantly, and by 2017 most flagship mobile GPUs (Apple A11, Snapdragon 835) had surpassed the Tegra X1 in benchmarks. Nintendo has their Tegra X1 downclocked below the stock speeds NVidia originally shipped it at however, so there's a good chance high end phones in 2015 would've been on par.
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Don't overly rely on one benchmark, and the Shield TV's clock speed is double the Switch anyways... not a correct comparison. I think it is a 2016 GPU with a 2014 CPU. Not by a lot, the GPU in the Switch is heavily downclocked, it is about half the shield in performance. Circa 2016's GPUs.
2015 but, eh, close enough
Kopite7Kimi didn't say Switch successor would use Ada/Lovelace, but that Orin could possibly be equipped with Ada/Lovelace GPC.
However, Orin is targeted at automotive markets and is far too beefy for any Switch successor and NVIDIA has already confirmed 3rd gen tensor cores for Orin, which pretty much confirms Ampere (of course there could be updated version with Ada/Lovelace GPC instead of Ampere, but it's still too beefy SoC for handheld as it is with it's estimated 60W+ consumption)
And I get very tired of watching things flicker so I had to turn DLSS off.
It will either way always result in a slightly softer image and I just don't really enjoy that in games, makes it feel like I got grease on my monitor or something.
And from what I can tell, the screen resolution on the existing Switch and what is rumored is the same, i.e. 720p. While it may gain more CPU and GPU power, going into portable mode also means that they need to balance performance vs power consumption. They may be able to achieve 720p@ 30FPS more stably than the current Switch which tend to drop to resolution to maintain 30 FPS.
This deal makes me wonder if Nvidia went to Nintendo over this because AMD has the other consoles. It seems odd Nvidia is doing this considering whats on their plate that they might be spread too thin.
I don't understand the negativity towards this, is just better hardware for an existing platform, being better or not to gaming on android or whatever. Nintendo isn't going to release a XBOXsX/PS5 competitor, so this is a fine approach.