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New Switch 2 specs show large performance dip in undocked mode
Digital Foundry also says Game Chat "has a significant impact on system resources."
While Nintendo offered an official spec sheet for the Switch 2 last month, neither it nor an accompanying blog post from chip-making partner Nvidia provided many specific numbers for the upcoming console's raw CPU and GPU horsepower. Today, though, Digital Foundry is offering what it calls "rock-solid confirmation" of the system's final tech specs, adding detail and clarity to years-old leaks and educated speculation on the system's internals (which turned out to be largely reliable in the end).
Unlike the Switch—which basically used an off-the-shelf Nvidia Tegra T1 chip—Digital Foundry says the Switch 2 is using "very much custom silicon designed specifically for Nintendo and for mobile gaming." You can see what that means in terms of raw hardware performance in the tables below.
| Switch 2 | Switch | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Docked (Quality) |
Undocked (Performance) |
Docked (Quality) |
Undocked (Performance) |
|
| CPU clock | 998 Mhz | 1101 Mhz | 1020 Mhz | 1020 Mhz |
| GPU clock | 1007 Mhz | 561 Mhz | 768 Mhz | 460 Mhz |
| Ray-tracing | 20 gigarays/sec | 10 gigarays/sec | N/A | N/A |
| Memory bandwidth | 102GB/s | 68GB/s | 25.6GB/s | 21.3GB/s |
| Switch 2 | Switch | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total | System (reserved) |
Total | System (reserved) |
|
| CPU cores | 8 | 2 | 4 | 1 |
| Memory | 12GB (LPDDR5X) | 3GB | 4GB | 0.8GB |
| Switch 2 | Switch | |
|---|---|---|
| CPU architecture | 8x ARM Cortex A78C | 4x ARM Cortex A57 |
| GPU architecture | Ampere | Maxwell |
| CUDA Cores | 1536 | 256 |
| Memory interface | 128-bit/LPDDR5 | 64-bit/LPDDR4 |
Glancing at those numbers, it's easy to pick out a large difference between the system's performance in docked and undocked modes; its CPU and GPU clocks and memory bandwidth all increase substantially when plugged into a TV. Those differences could help explain why the Switch 2 dock uses an active cooling fan, unlike the much simpler TV-connection dock on the original Switch.
