Custom NVIDIA Tegra Powers the Nintendo Switch - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 20 October 2016 / 14,889 Views
Nintendo and NVIDIA have announced the Nintendo Switch will be powered with custom NVIDIA Tegra technology.
"The first thing to know about the new Nintendo Switch home gaming system: it’s really fun to play," reads a blog post from NVIDIA. "With great graphics, loads of game titles and incredible performance, the Nintendo Switch will provide people with many hours of engaging and interactive gaming entertainment.
"But creating a device so fun required some serious engineering. The development encompassed 500 man-years of effort across every facet of creating a new gaming platform: algorithms, computer architecture, system design, system software, APIs, game engines and peripherals. They all had to be rethought and redesigned for Nintendo to deliver the best experience for gamers, whether they’re in the living room or on the move.
"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.
"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.
"We’ve optimized the full suite of hardware and software for gaming and mobile use cases. This includes custom operating system integration with the GPU to increase both performance and efficiency.
"NVIDIA gaming technology is integrated into all aspects of the new Nintendo Switch home gaming system, which promises to deliver a great experience to gamers."
The Nintendo Switch launches in March 2017.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
More Articles
l may have to "switch" from my Vita to this home/mobile system.
I'm continuously amazed by how many words can be used to say pretty much nothing. They provided zero actual benchmarks about the performance of the chip, and only offered a vague comparison about the general architecture to misdirect about how powerful the GPU might actually be.
Considering the price to performance ratio for mobile chips, I can only guess that the chip will either be underwhelming, the NX will be too expensive, or Nintendo plans on taking a loss for multiple years on systems sold. Just, please Nintendo, don't give us a gimped system to make a new gimmick a reality. This time, do us a solid and balance power, features, and the game library effectively.
Nvidia is not a shy company when it comes to specs. This probably means Nintendo will keep specs quiet again.
Specs matter, which is why this lack detail isn't comforting, but at least the versatility and customization of the Switch, what with it's numerous ways to play are a huge selling point.
Specs matter, but that we all know a device this big can't deliver power at par with current gen home consoles. A powerful home console from Nintendo would likely fail, Nintendo needs to do something unique and Switch is that.
But the question still remains: Will the dock also be a gpu/cpu?
From the sounds of it no. They mention the GPU is scalable which means it turns things on/off depending on what mode it is in. So my guess is there is only one graphics chip in there.
so not so good graphics?
powered by a polarias tegra chip, have you actually seen how powerful the polaris architecture is?
Polaris is AMD's Tech, Pascal is NVIDIA
lol i was wondering why i had so many down votes, i meant pascal lol
Skyrim remastered is not a good game to show off graphics.
For a portable device, it looks pretty amazing.
