Goodbye Super Nintendo Switch Pro, welcome to Nintendo Switch 2!

With Nintendo, it is always difficult to separate things and disentangle the true from the false. Remember the months before the announcement of the Nintendo Switch, the Japanese firm remained on theone of the biggest flops in its history with the Wii Uthis console that no one understood, not even the vast majority of 101.63 million Wii owners who thought it was just an optional accessory for the console star of the time.

In the end, between its launch on November 18, 2012 and the launch of the Switch in March 2017, Nintendo will only have sold 13.56 million Wii U, 8 times less than its big sister the Wii. An obvious marketing and commercial error due to a totally misunderstood name and concept. But what would this console have been like if it had been called Wii 2? Unfortunately, we will never know…

All that to say that with Nintendo, more than with anyone else, you have to be wary of anything that comes out on the net. Because our Japanese friends are champions at blurring the tracks, remember the Nintendo Dolphin, at the very end of the 90s, beginning of 2000, of which some would have sworn to have seen prototypes running, so that finally it was the (or the as you want) GameCube coming out of the closet with the heavy task (already) of succeeding the N64.

More recently, we could have bet that the console that would make people forget the failure of the Wii U would be the Nintendo NX before increasingly insistent rumors spoke of a possible revolutionary hybrid console… The Nintendo Switch was born!

The “famous” Nintendo Dolphin

Since its launch and a success that has not run out of steam, rumors have been rife about who will take over, and after a Switch Lite and a Switch OLED, the question that comes up on everyone’s lips: “will we have entitled to a Nintendo Switch Pro?”. We have even heard of “Super Nintendo Switch Pro” but in reality, if Nintendo is obviously working on a new model, it seems that we are simply moving towards a Nintendo Switch 2, so as not to repeat the mistakes of the past and ride the wave.

Nvidia and Nintendo working hand in hand for the development of the Switch 2

One of, if not THE, main criticisms that can be made of the Switch with hindsight, is clearly its lack of power, which prevents it from competing with the machines of Sony and Microsoft, even if Nintendo affirms on all the roofs that they do not box in the same category and that the concept is more important than the power. What we want to answer, “yes, but…”.

If a Zelda Breath of the Wild could, in its time, let us hope for great things, 5 years after its release, few games have been able to technically match Nintendo’s masterpiece and it is not always the bad will of the developers which is to blame. Yes the Nintendo Switch is a great console with an incredible concept, but today it is far too limited and we must seriously consider the sequel.

If the concept of the Nintendo Switch 2 should not evolve too much, it is in its bowels that we will have to see the main changes and in particular on the side of the famous Tegra X1 chip supplied by Nvidia which already dates from 2015, an eternity in this environment.

Unlike the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series, which work much like a PC, with a motherboard, processor, and graphics card (both powered by AMD chips), the Switch is more like a smartphone or tablet. and uses an ARM-like architecture in conjunction with arch-rival Nvidia.

The interest of an ARM SoC lies in the fact of being able to concentrate in a single chip the microprocessor, the graphics chip and all the necessary controllers. This saves a lot of space and consumption is better controlled. This is why our smartphones, our tablets or the Switch use this type of architecture.

Did an Nvidia employee release confidential information around the Nintendo Switch 2?

The first rumors around the chip that will equip the Nintendo Switch 2 already go back to last year and speak of a SoC Tegra 239a customized version of the Tegra 234 Orin especially for Nintendo and its new machine.

In all likelihood, this chip would embed 8 ARM Cortex A78C CPU cores as well as an Ampere graphics chip (GPU), the same one found in RTX 3000 graphics cards (which range from 3050 to 3090 Ti). Enough to calmly consider the game in 4K at 60 FPS thanks to a long-awaited function, the famous DLSS from Nvidia in version 2.2.

For those who are not yet familiar with DLSS, it is a technology developed by Nvidia and very popular on PC, because it allows, thanks to artificial intelligence, to significantly improve game performance for the most modest configurations.

Concretely, and without going into technical details, this allows you to play and display an image in 4K while the game is “only” running in Full HD (1080p). We then speak of upscaling. The game is then more beautiful and more fluid and at the cost, sometimes, of a slight blur on the objects but imperceptible for our eyes in the heat of the action, especially since the release of DLSS 2.0 (here we would have the right to a version 2.2). For information, if you have followed the announcements of the next RTX 4000 cards, these will be entitled to the brand new DLSS 3.0.

Another novelty expected and provided by the Tegra 239 chip, Ray Tracing would also appear, bringing Nintendo full force into the “Next Gen”. As a reminder, Ray Tracing is this technology, quite greedy, which realistically calculates the visible and invisible light rays. It thus allows realistic and dynamic lighting, all that does not offer, for example, a Pokémon Legends: Arceus, to name only him…

And if we are talking about it today with such insistence and precision, it is because the rumor took on a new dimension after an email, obviously sent by mistake, from an employee of Nvidia is arrived at Kernel.org

If all these rumors are particularly exciting, a last one makes us salivate even more, this one no longer speaks of an Ampere architecture for the graphics part, but rather around Ada Lovelace, the one found on the very last RTX 4000…

Whatever, no announcement is planned before the end of the first half of 2023 and therefore no release is to be considered before the fall of 2023 or rather even the 1st quarter of 2024, 7 years after the launch of Nintendo Switch. 7 years is the “classic” rhythm between two generations of consoles, we’re in the nails!

Buy the Nintendo Switch OLED console at 311€ on Amazon

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