10x faster than the original: Nvidia unveils technical details and TFLOPs of the Nintendo Switch 2

The Nintendo Switch 2 was officially unveiled on Wednesday, and numerous hands-on videos have already surfaced online. However, besides the fact that games can run at 4K with 60 frames per second while docked or 1080p at 120 fps in handheld mode, Nintendo has not provided any details about the built-in processor or the console's overall performance.

According to rumors, the Switch 2 is powered by the Nvidia Tegra T239, which features eight ARM Cortex-A78E performance cores, 12GB RAM and an Ampere GPU with 1,536 CUDA cores. For reference, this GPU architecture was introduced with the GeForce RTX 3000 series. Nvidia has now confirmed a few technical details about the Nintendo Switch 2 in a blog post. While Nvidia doesn’t mention the Tegra T239 chipset, it claims that the chip has ten times the GPU performance compared to the first-generation Nintendo Switch.

In docked mode, this would translate to 3.9 TFLOPs, which means that the hybrid console would be just as quick as the Xbox Series S. According to Nvidia, the chip has dedicated RT and Tensor cores for hardware-accelerated ray tracing and DLSS, the latter of which enables AI-powered upscaling to higher resolutions. Furthermore, the Tensor cores allow the Nintendo Switch 2 camera to track the user's face and isolate it using AI. Another new piece of information is that the Switch 2 supports VRR in handheld mode, so the display's refresh rate can be adjusted to match the games FPS in order to prevent screen tearing.