The Nintendo Switch is nearly seven years old now, and with reports suggesting that its successor will now be released in 2025, there's a lot of talk about how underpowered the system is in comparison to competitors. While those conversations are repetitive and outright tired given that a console is clearly more than the sum of its computational prowess, there's some merit in pointing out how underpowered the Switch in particular truly is. Even if it's just to give kudos to Nintendo.

As a recap, the Nintendo Switch released with the Nvidia Tegra X1 chipset, an SoC that powered devices like the Nvidia Shield and the Google Pixel C. With its Maxwell GPU, it was capable of graphics processing that no other competitors were able for in this form factor, but even at launch the CPU was underpowered. The Tegra X1 in the Nintendo Switch only uses four cores, and at that, four Cortex A57 cores.

As for why that's relevant: A5x cores from Arm are low power cores. They're not meant to handle anything intensive, and you'd struggle to run most modern workloads on them nowadays. Because of that, the calibre of games on the Nintendo Switch is incredibly impressive, but it's also why the console has really shown its age with poor performance in recent games like the Batman: Arkham Collection or Saints Row: The Third.

With the Nintendo Switch, though, even first-party titles like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom can push the console to its limit. YouTubers like Modern Vintage Gamer have managed to overcome these limitations by overclocking the CPU and memory, but that's not available to everyone unless they have a hacked Switch, and it can also potentially damage your console.

The current problems with the Nintendo Switch

CPU and memory bandwidth

To recap the specifications of the Nintendo Switch: it uses an Nvidia chip with an underpowered CPU but a fairly decent GPU, it has 4GB of LPDDR4 memory, and it has a 25.6GB/s memory bandwidth. 4GB of RAM isn't exactly a lot given that it also needs to act as vRAM for the GPU, which makes it a marvel that we manage to get many of the games that we do on the Switch. Titles like Doom: Eternal feel like genuinely impossible ports under these conditions.

The smaller RAM size and reduced memory bandwidth also contribute to a vicious cycle of poor performance, as streaming assets from the cartridge to RAM for rendering will be slower, particularly as those assets are first fetched by the CPU and decompressed before being sent to RAM. There are some key technological improvements in this area that Nintendo are rumored to be using with the Switch 2; more on that in a bit.

All of this is why some recent titles have opted to use cloud streaming to provide a playable experience to gamers. Many of the Resident Evil games, for example, are cloud-based on the Switch, and so is Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy. The hardware is simply not capable of sustaining the performance required for more modern titles, which is a shame given the impressive sales figures of the Switch.

What the Nintendo Switch 2 may have in store

Leaks point to some big improvements

While leaks are a dime a dozen when it comes to the Nintendo Switch, there's one leak that cropped up a while ago relating to the upcoming Switch that's more credible than most, and that's the rumored SoC. Nvidia was hacked quite a while ago in what was known as the "Gigaleak," giving us glimpses at upcoming industry titles including Half-Life 2 Remastered, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Horizon Forbidden West, and many more. In that leak was also a reference to the Tegra T239.

An analysis by Digital Foundry broke down why it's likely that the Tegra T239 is the SoC powering the Switch 2, or at the very least, something very similar to it. In essence, though, the biggest smoking gun is found in the Nvidia Gigaleak. It was confirmed that Nvidia is testing a new graphics API dubbed NVN2, where NVN is the name of the graphics API used exclusively for the Nintendo Switch. What's more, NVN2's internal testing shows that Nvidia has been using it with an emulated T239, making it a very strong possibility that this is the SoC powering the next Nintendo Switch.

The Tegra T239 looks to be a significant leap over the T210 (the part number of the Tegra-X1 in the Switch), thanks to a few key improvements. For starters, it's said to have eight Cortex-A78C cores, a big CPU improvement already. On top of that, the GPU is said to have a much larger 128-bit memory bus with a maximum bandwidth of 102GB/s — if Nintendo doesn't downclock it, that is. Finally, the T239 is said to be using Nvidia's Ampere graphics architecture with some features backported from Ada Lovelace.

The Nvidia T239 is expected to be a cut-down version of the T234, which kopite7kimi has claimed in the past. There's one other addition that isn't in the T234 though, and that's a File Decompression Engine, or FDE. Like the PlayStation 5 has, it can facilitate ultra-fast loading by reading assets directly into the GPU's addressable space and decompressing them on the fly.

With all of this in mind, what we're currently fairly sure of when it comes to the upcoming Nintendo Switch 2 is the following:

• It will have eight Cortex-A78C cores
• It will have an Ampere-based GPU with some Ada Lovelace features backported
• It will have a larger memory bandwidth
• It will have a File Decompression Engine

While none of this is confirmed, there's a ridiculous amount of information that can be gleaned between the Nvidia hack and other evidence floating around. The T239 definitely exists, and Nvidia is testing it with a successor to a gaming API that, so far, has only been used with the Nintendo Switch.

How powerful will the Nintendo Switch 2 be?

Rumors suggest that it's capable of quite a lot

At last year's Gamescom, it was reported following the event that Nintendo had demoed the Switch 2 to some developers, showing The Matrix Awakens running on it. While not confirmed, Nintendo obviously will be testing Unreal Engine 5 on the Switch 2, as it's the go-to game engine for console developers currently. If Nintendo didn't support it, they would be choosing to not support one of the most-used game engines available today.

Contextually, The Matrix Awakens is very likely to be the Switch's Doom (2016) moment. It's a game that clearly pushes the envelope in what the machine is capable of, and it'll be used to show exactly that. It very likely makes use of DLSS for upscaling, but that's an excellent thing if games can be upscaled to run at higher resolutions and still look good.

We'll be waiting to see just how powerful the Switch 2 is, as former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick said that it's capable of last-generation performance. As a handheld, that's excellent, and it may provide the much-needed boost that the Switch successor needs to repeat its runaway success.