Unsurprisingly, the first leak of the year is related to the Nintendo Switch 2. Three pictures of the upcoming console’s motherboard have allegedly leaked on Reddit.
The memory appears to be SK Hynix LPDDR5 48Gbit. The leaked images also show NVIDIA’s logo, which is again entirely expected given that previous leaks all pointed to the Nintendo Switch 2 once again being powered by NVIDIA hardware. More specifically, it will use the Tegra 239 System-on-Chip (SoC), which is based on the Orin SoC family. The CPU has eight cores and 12x ARM Cortex-A78AE cores, while the GPU, based on NVIDIA’s Ampere architecture, includes 2048 CUDA Cores. The hardware reportedly supports Deep Learning Super Sampling Super Resolution and Ray Reconstruction, the latter’s inclusion confirming hardware ray tracing support.
According to previous leaks, it won’t feature built-in Frame Generation. However, several console games have shipped with AMD FSR Frame Generation, and on PC, it is possible to mix DLSS Super Resolution with FSR Frame Generation. We might see that again from some developers making Nintendo Switch 2 games as a way to extract more performance.
DLSS Ray Reconstruction might be the only real advantage the hardware has over PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X. Otherwise, experts concur that the new console will be much weaker than even the Series S, and it is rumored to be limited to 4K resolution and 30 frames per second when docked. Then again, it’s nothing new for Nintendo fans – the last competitive console in this regard was the GameCube, which also flopped pretty hard from a sales standpoint.
The Nintendo Switch 2 will once again try to attract a large audience with its seamless combination of handheld and home console that worked so well for its predecessor. The Switch just surpassed the lifetime sales of Sony’s PlayStation 2 in the United States. Globally, the PS2 is still ahead, but Nintendo’s console might get very close before all is said and done.
The increasing pace of the leaks suggests a reveal might be really close. A previous rumor points to a January 8 unveiling by Nintendo, while the accessories are rumored to be available on the market starting on March 28.
