What’s inside the Nintendo Switch?

NVIDIA claims Nintendo’s new console is ‘based on the same architecture as the world’s top-performing GeForce gaming graphics card’.

Although Nintendo might not have said anything about the Switch’s innards, graphics technology firm NVIDIA have. Promising that it will be able to generate ‘great graphics’.

‘Nintendo Switch is powered by the performance of the custom Tegra processor. The high-efficiency scalable processor includes an NVIDIA GPU based on the same architecture as the world’s top-performing GeForce gaming graphics cards’, said the firm in a new blog update.

‘The Nintendo Switch’s gaming experience is also supported by fully custom software, including a revamped physics engine, new libraries, advanced game tools and libraries. NVIDIA additionally created new gaming APIs to fully harness this performance. The newest API, NVN, was built specifically to bring lightweight, fast gaming to the masses.’




‘Gameplay is further enhanced by hardware-accelerated video playback and custom software for audio effects and rendering’, adds the description.

All of which sounds encouraging, and certainly the brief video clips of games in the reveal trailer do look impressive. They also seem more advanced than the Wii U is generally capable of, but how much more powerful the Switch is remains to be seem.

NVIDIA’s involvement with the new console has been known about for some time, with previous speculation revolving around whether the Switch, then known only as NX, would use the established Tegra X1 processor or the brand new X2.

The blog doesn’t mention such details, but it’s thought it’s unlikely it’d be the X2 as it’s too new – and therefore too expensive. Although depending on how much customisation has gone on, that may not really matter.

Nintendo Switch – just how powerful is it?

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