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Digital Foundry Believes that Nintendo Switch 2's Tegra T239 SoC is 8 nm Part

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Yesterday, Nintendo officially unveiled its Switch 2 handheld via a first look video presentation. Featured content did not come as a surprise to many gaming enthusiasts—a steady flow of leaks have already revealed outer and inner workings. Earlier today, the Digital Foundry team has offered their collective opinion on Nintendo's formal announcement. Their roundtable discussion first focused on the Switch 2's physical appearance—mainly a showcased physical increase in size, when lined up against the preceding (standard) model. Conversation quickly moved onto technical matters—a topic that Nintendo normally avoids discussing. The video presentation included in-game footage of a next-gen Mario Kart title—Oliver Mackenzie (a contributing DF video producer/writer) was not impressed by this short demo's visual fidelity. He noted an absence of DLSS image enhancement—surprising, given that the rumored NVIDIA Tegra T239 SoC is capable of deploying this graphics technology.

John, Rich and Oliver then moved onto discussing recently leaked clock speeds and performance figures (in handheld and docked modes)—overall, they reckon that these numbers seem fitting for a hybrid system. They noticed that the handheld GPU clock was lower than expected—based on their judgement of the Switch 2's fairly capable integrated cooling solution. In the past, Digital Foundry theorized that the NVIDIA-designed Tegra T239 will be an 8 nanometer part—rumored to be built on Samsung 8 nm DUV foundry node. Newer gaming community-generated proposals have suggested a shift to Samsung's 5 nm EUV node—mostly based on the chipset's physical footprint. In sharp contrast, the Digital Foundry guys are sticking with their 8 nm theory. Richard Leadbetter (DF's founder) has previously attempted to simulate Switch 2-esque performance on readily available Ampere-based hardware—he could revisit and perform tests on a laptop that sports Team Green's GeForce RTX 2050 mobile GPU. He believes that the leaked CPU and GPU clocks (across both modes) present plausible evidence of 8 nm-level performance, cross-referenced with his team's past analysis of the system's PCB. Debates will inevitably rage on, but Rich insists that the end result will be an example of "Occam's razor." The Tegra T239's four (long alleged) Cortex A78 cores appeared to be running at a higher frequency in portable mode than in docked—suggesting some unknown factors; perhaps a switching on or off of cores (situation dependent). Leadbetter and Co. will be looking forward to getting a proper hands-on experience at Nintendo's April to June launch events.




Digital Foundry's video description: "Nintendo Switch 2 has finally been revealed in a somewhat detail-light two minute presentation, showcasing renders of the new hardware, some details on backwards compatibility and a teaser for what may well be Mario Kart 9. John, Rich and Oliver sit down after the reveal and discuss the reveal—along with some intriguing leaks about the clock speeds of the main processor."


Continued: "Note—when Rich talks about the gulf in GPU performance between handheld and docked modes being higher than Switch 1, that depends on which handheld config is used. According to the leak, Switch 2 docked is 79.5% faster than handheld. The differential with Switch 1 is anything between 67% faster to 2.5x depending on which mobile profile the developer selects. Switch 2 may well have various profiles too, of course."

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Never thought I'd see the day that I'm more exited for this than 50 series....
 
It'd be a mistake for Nintendo to "underpower" this thing! The same schtick is unlikely to work with the post-millennial crowd.
 
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Eh supporting Nintendo in 2025....or 24...or 23.....or earlier than that, with them being as annoying with their IP's etc....yeah no, too anti consumer imo
 
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It'd be a mistake for Nintendo to "underpower" this thing! The same schtick is unlikely to work with the post-millennial crowd.
You mean gen z? They love this thing! It's about the games, what part of that is hard to understand? Being able to see the nose hairs on your ugly protagonist as they lecture you isnt the system seller people think it is.
 
It'd be a mistake for Nintendo to "underpower" this thing! The same schtick is unlikely to work with the post-millennial crowd.

150 millions switch sold and on their way to beat PS2. Don't worry about "post-millenial" crowd, if they were happy with a 350$ 14nm underclocked tegra X1 OLED console they will be happy with a (rumoured) 400$ Tegra t239 console that is so much more powerful, I am very happy with it too, played countless great games on it.

it's underpowered when comparing to a 700+$ Rog Ally sure, however given what Nintendo and their partners managed to do with the off-the-shelf tegra X1, I think this switch 2 is going to just fine because what matters is not tflop, it's the game and the experience, you cannot see Nintendo through a PC vision lol.
 
Eh supporting Nintendo in 2025....or 24...or 23.....or earlier then then, with them being as annoying with their IP's etc....yeah no, too anti consumer imo
Yea I am getting tired of Nintendo's attitude towards all their IP's. Remember that switch Metroid Prime game announced for Switch that now is likely going to be for Switch 2...

They need to power this thing up. Not crazy, but make it significantly more powerful at least in dock mode so we can get bigger games.
 
Yea I am getting tired of Nintendo's attitude towards all their IP's. Remember that switch Metroid Prime game announced for Switch that now is likely going to be for Switch 2...

They need to power this thing up. Not crazy, but make it significantly more powerful at least in dock mode so we can get bigger games.
Metroid Prime 4 was already revealed running on Switch 1 last year. I have my issue with how draconian Nintendo can be at times, but I feel a lot of the vitriol is from people that never intented to buy Nintendo games in the first place and simply looking to excuse their piracy. I wish Metroid Prime 4 would have come out years ago. That said, I'd rather Nintendo scrap the original project with the original development team, delay the game, and have it started all over again with new development team than release a turd for the sake of expediency. The latter is done too often by too many publishers.
 
Metroid Prime 4 was already revealed running on Switch 1 last year. I have my issue with how draconian Nintendo can be at times, but I feel a lot of the vitriol is from people that never intented to buy Nintendo games in the first place and simply looking to excuse their piracy. I wish Metroid Prime 4 would have come out years ago. That said, I'd rather Nintendo scrap the original project with the original development team, delay the game, and have it started all over again with new development team than release a turd for the sake of expediency. The latter is done too often by too many publishers.
Yea but it would not surprise me if they move it to Switch 2 launch title at this point. I am just tired of how many franchises Nintendo has sitting in their portfolio and do absolutely nothing with. Punch Out, Star Fox, Metroid, F-Zero, and many more that just sit on the back burner. I am all fine with them scrapping the project if it was junk and making it better, but its really annoying how Nintendo takes forever with releases or just dumps projects. I am getting tired of waiting years for releases from Nintendo for games that don't warrant that kind of development cycle.
 
The pendulum is swinging back to console gaming in my opinion. PC component prices have remained too high for too long, and many PC game exclusivity has almost completely died with exception of Valve.
 
Yea but it would not surprise me if they move it to Switch 2 launch title at this point. I am just tired of how many franchises Nintendo has sitting in their portfolio and do absolutely nothing with. Punch Out, Star Fox, Metroid, F-Zero, and many more that just sit on the back burner. I am all fine with them scrapping the project if it was junk and making it better, but its really annoying how Nintendo takes forever with releases or just dumps projects. I am getting tired of waiting years for releases from Nintendo for games that don't warrant that kind of development cycle.
That makes no sense. The Switch 2 is backward compatible. They aren't going to drop a niche franchise like Metroid solely on the Switch 2 when the Switch 1 is sitting on a 150 million unit install base. The extended dev cycle due to having the scrap the Bandai Namco build and hiring more talent for Retro to develop current iteration of the game means it has to be on Switch 1 to have a chance at profitability. Based on pixel counters, Metroid Prime 4 runs at 900p at 60fps on Switch 1. They'll probably add some sort of Switch 2 Fidelity mode that crank ups the base resolution, upscales that resolution to 4K via DLSS, toss in a few extra graphical effects, and call it a day.
 
No OLED is a deal-breaker for me.
 
No OLED is a deal-breaker for me.
What about it not being oled makes it a deal breaker?
I get why you would want your home theatre to be oled if you are a movie buff and watch movies in the dark.

dont see the point for a portable gaming machine to have it
 
Anything to do with Nintendo - hard pass.
 
I only ever buy nintendo systems to play Pokemon. But this will be the first one I don't. I do not like how they recently treated a bunch of people emulating their games (even if they own copies the things). And this new console feels very low effort to me at least in design. We dont know the features yet so my opinion could change but we'll see.
 
What about it not being oled makes it a deal breaker?
I get why you would want your home theatre to be oled if you are a movie buff and watch movies in the dark.

dont see the point for a portable gaming machine to have it

ermm play games in the dark? in bed? like a portable gaming machine easily allows you to do?
 
You have to laugh at how risk averse Nintendo is when it comes to hardware. But I guess it's fine when all it does is play platform and puzzle games.
 
That makes no sense. The Switch 2 is backward compatible. They aren't going to drop a niche franchise like Metroid solely on the Switch 2 when the Switch 1 is sitting on a 150 million unit install base. The extended dev cycle due to having the scrap the Bandai Namco build and hiring more talent for Retro to develop current iteration of the game means it has to be on Switch 1 to have a chance at profitability. Based on pixel counters, Metroid Prime 4 runs at 900p at 60fps on Switch 1. They'll probably add some sort of Switch 2 Fidelity mode that crank ups the base resolution, upscales that resolution to 4K via DLSS, toss in a few extra graphical effects, and call it a day.
Well for starters I doubt Nintendo is at all worried about sales figures on the Switch 2. So I don't think they are worried about missing people in purchasing the game. Just because its backwards compatible does not mean they could not limit the game to switch 2 only. Now I will say their track record is good enough I am not positive one way or another (As they have put games on previous and current before like Breath of the Wild), but they could decide that if they really want to push people to buy the Switch 2. It running on the older hardware is not the problem, its a 1st party title and they can do with it as they please as many companies do.

I am not saying I know for a fact it will happen. Just that I will not be surprised if it does.
 
Well for starters I doubt Nintendo is at all worried about sales figures on the Switch 2. So I don't think they are worried about missing people in purchasing the game. Just because its backwards compatible does not mean they could not limit the game to switch 2 only. Now I will say their track record is good enough I am not positive one way or another (As they have put games on previous and current before like Breath of the Wild), but they could decide that if they really want to push people to buy the Switch 2. It running on the older hardware is not the problem, its a 1st party title and they can do with it as they please as many companies do.

I am not saying I know for a fact it will happen. Just that I will not be surprised if it does.
Then I'll agree to disagree. If it were struggling to run on Switch 1, sure I could see it. But the game runs at 900p at 60fps on the original Switch.
 
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