Nintendo Switch 2 dev kit substitute with AMD and Nvidia parts put together by YouTuber delivers promising gaming results

A new video from Austin Evans has followed his attempt to put together a sort of Nintendo Switch 2 dev kit to test for processing performance and gaming ability. As the YouTuber points out, the simulation was just for fun and based on the most common rumors about the next-gen Switch’s components. Evans ordered an Nvidia Jetson Orin NX 16 GB kit (at US$899), while also reminding his audience that “NX” was used for the Nintendo Switch’s codename. However, he clearly knows that NX for the kit stands for “Nano Xavier”. He opens up the kit to show off the SoC inside it and describes its key specs: 8-core CPU (TE980-M) and GPU with 1,024 shader processors alongside 16 GB LPDDR5 RAM.

After benchmarking the developer kit on Geekbench and GravityMark, Evans proceeds to build a “Switch 2” PC utilizing an underclocked AMD Ryzen 7 2700X (@2.25 GHz; no SMT) and underclocked Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 as these parts produced the most similar results to the Orin NX 16 GB. An RTX 3050 was also tested, as it offers the same Ampere architecture as the Tegra kit, but it was deemed unstable. As can be seen in the screenshots below for The Witcher 3, Apex Legends, and Fortnite, the Nintendo Switch 2 dev kit substitute offered much better output than its Switch OLED Model rival. FPS rates for the dev kit doppelganger went anywhere from 1.5x higher to as much as over 4.5x greater than the console, with the added bonus of higher resolution (see table below).