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 GPU clock and memory bandwidth both 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.