Bloomberg analyst claims that the upcoming Nintendo Switch Pro could support 4K gaming: NVIDIA’s 1.4 TFLOP Tegra Xavier SoC might just get the job done

After rumors emerged about a Nintendo Switch successor set to take on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X next year, a Bloomberg analyst claimed that the alleged “Switch Pro” will be powerful enough to support 4K gaming. 

Bloomberg’s Takashi Mochizuki claimed that Nintendo is looking into greater compute power and 4K graphics for the Switch successor. If the Switch Pro is indeed 4K capable, it raises a number new questions. What SoC will Nintendo utilise to deliver a playable 4K experience?

If Nintendo continues to rely on NVIDIA for Switch hardware, the only real option is the NVIDIA Tegra Xavier. Xavier powers a model of NVIDIA’s Jetson AGX developer kit but it hasn’t seen much use outside that. The SoC features 8 custom “Carmel” ARM cores, together with a 512 CUDA core Volta GPU that delivers 1.4 TFLOPs of compute performance. 

This would mean that a Xavier-powered Switch Pro could deliver twice the graphics performance and significantly greater CPU power than the existing Nintendo Switch. However, considering how 1.4 TFLOPs is just slightly greater than the Xbox One’s GPU compute performance, we don’t see an updated Switch Pro doing 4K in most AAA titles. At best, a handful of first-party Nintendo games might output 4K at 30 FPS or 60 FPS if frame reconstruction techniques are leveraged. 

It’ll be interesting to see what Nintendo’s Switch Pro plans are. While a Xavier-powered Switch Pro might not be able to go toe to toe with the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, it should deliver PlayStation 4-level gaming in a mobile form factor, a considerable step forward from the current-gen Switch.