Rumor: Development on Switch Successor is 'Progressing Well' - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 09 May 2023 / 4,579 Views
The development on the successor to the Nintendo Switch is reportedly "progressing well," according to a source who is close to Nintendo that spoke with Nikkei Asia.
"Development seems to be progressing well," said the source. "But a product launch won't happen before next spring at the earliest."
Nintendo has reported sales for the Switch slowed down with a forecast of 15 million for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024. This is a 16.5 percent decrease year-on-year.
Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa stated its "goal of selling 15 million unit this fiscal year is a bit of stretch. But we will do our best to bolster demand going into the holiday season so that we can achieve the goal."
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 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Considering every platform holder essentially start development on their next console right after releasing the previous one, it would be a bit strange if development isn't prgressing well, 6+ years into it.
Just let it be a more powerful Switch named "Switch 2", please.
We don't even need PS5 levels of power. If its performance is comparable to, say, a PS4 Pro, that's more than enough. I suppose DLSS and other fancy Nvidia technologies could help close the gap to reach that level of performance even if the chip's raw power isn't enough by itself.
Even if you had to downgrade the graphics for multiplatform releases, no game in a PS4 Pro looks bad. The power-issue, perceptually, would't matter nearly as close as it did for the Switch VS PS4/One releases.
In my honest opinion as a Switch user ever since its release, that's all I want (other than better online) after 7 years of use. More raw power in the little handheld that could.
There is no way in hell that you're going to get a handheld machine in 2024 with PS4 Pro specs that will sell at a price Nintendo finds acceptable while still being profitable, or at least break even.
I think they could manage about 65-75% of PS4 Pro GPU power, a few GB more RAM than PS4 Pro, better than PS4 Pro's Jaguar CPU, and faster storage than PS4 Pro if they are willing to go up to $350-400 from $300 on Switch. But yeah, I don't see them matching or exceeding PS4 Pro on GPU, nor can they match PS4 Pro on memory speed due to the fastest LPDDR5 being slower than PS4 Pro's GDDR5. Not unless they are willing to wait until 2025 or 2026 to release, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
Supposedly Switch 2 is using a custom, cut down Nvidia Orin chipset with a special design that puts all 8 CPU cores into a single cluster instead of them being spread between 3 clusters in a normal Orin chipset, in order to cut down on total SoC size. We just don't know how cut-down the GPU is, is the GPU equivalent to the AGX Orin 32GB (3.3 tflops) or equivalent to the NX Orin 16 GB (1.9 tflops) or somewhere in between, that is the question right now.
Orin uses the Ampere architecture, which has doubled floating point units that can't be used simultaneously with the integer pipelines.
So its TFLOPS output is not directly comparable to the PS or Xbox's since games use both floats and integers most of the time (most things do, really).
You have to multiply those Orin numbers by 0.6-0.75 to have something more or less equivalent to AMD's GCN/RDNA2 in terms of performance.
LPDDR5 can provide more bandwidth than the GDDR5 on the Playstation 4 Pro.
Case in point...
The Playstation 4 Pro has 218GB/s of bandwidth.
LPDDR5 on a 512bit bus can offer 416.8GB/s almost doubling the PS4 Pro's bandwidth.
It all comes down to how it's implemented rather than the "version" of Ram... Because realistically if Microsoft made the DDR3 ram wide enough on the Xbox One, it could technically offer more bandwidth than the Xbox Series X.
A cut down Orin should offer more performance than the Playstation 4 Pro.
Keep in mind that Graphics Core Next is a very compute heavy architecture that is bandwidth starved... It's extremely inefficient for gaming, so teraflops doesn't tell the whole story.
Orin has Delta Colour compression (Boosting usable bandwidth by 25-70% over Maxwell, a ton more over AMD GCN), DLSS, Ray Tracing, more efficient scheduler, tiled based rendering, more geometry throughput thanks to the more powerful Polymorph engines, much improved caching and more.
It's a more efficient GPU, on paper it may seem less impressive, but people tend not look past the black and white numbers and the bigger picture as a whole.
Yeah I mean PS4 Pro, no, but PS4/XB1 level yeah I definitely expect that kind of power from Switch 2, at least in docked mode. That power level at $350 would be perfect for next-gen Switch. And then if DLSS means they can run games in docked mode at like let's say 1080p and then bump it up to 4k with little hit to the system then it's basically PS4 Pro / XB1X ability level, which is great. And in handheld maybe run stuff at like 540p or something and use DLSS to bump it up to 900p (or whatever resolution the screen ends up being). I would definitely expect it to be able to run PS4/XBX games (in 4K using DLSS) without a problem and with no downgrading like Switch needed. This also means any game that runs on XBSeriesS should be able to run on it as well, making console ports to Switch 2 very possible.
Other than that, just use the superior form that did with OLED, perhaps improved even a bit more, make sure battery life is good, make sure there's no bad joystick drift, improve the strength of the connecting rails between the main part and the controllers. Full backwards compatibility goes without saying. Make sure online and NSO, and bluetooth are on there day 1.
That's all I need and want. Just a basic next-gen upgrade of the Switch.
Though I'm guessing Nintendo is gonna try to do sooooome sort of new feature (gimmick as some people would call it). If they do hopefully its something that is good and useful and actually worth whatever the cost is of implementing it. I don't mind them doing that as long as it is cool and useful.
My only problems with the Switch are small ones - took a while for online to be added and NSO to get built out, online play is typical Nintendo online mediocrity, joycon drift, physical connections between joycons and system eventually starts having problems, and shoulder buttons could be stronger as well cuz I'm definitely having problems with my R button these days. Fix all that / have all the services ready on day 1 and do a standard generational spec update, put it at $350, backwards compatibility (which is the only thing that would make me get a Switch 2 in the next few years cuz I got tons of Switch games still to play through) launch it with 3D Mario and MK9 in the launch window with more good games a few months later, and it's golden.
Oh and better have at least 128g disk space. Even that would be very lackluster but the 32g this gen is ridic small since some games take up more than half the space on the Switch. 1 TB would be ideal, but its Nintendo so I think 128gb is probably best we can expect.
While I agree it should just be a more powerful Switch called "Switch 2" or something, I don't think in terms of raw power we'll get PS4 Pro specs. I think we'll get a hybrid of much improved specs and graphic enhancing techniques (i.e. DLSS) to create visually stunning games.
This thing is still at the end of the day, a handheld. Or I think it will be. And Nintendo wants this to be a sleek, mass consumer device. But overall I'm thinking more along the lines of a portable PS4 with some bells and whistles that allow it to do things that even current gen doesn't do.
Ya expect a switch 2 to do.things technische that a ps5 can't do?
Lol
The ps4 pro gpu is based on old architecture. What ever goes into the switch 2, it needs to be much more advanced, if they want to make new experiences, otherwise it will be the same type of game seen on switch.
It looks like Nintendo has learned from the past and prefers to wait with the launch of a new console a bit longer instead of cutting the support too early (like Wii & DS). A launch of a new console isn't a guaranteed success, especially in the case of Nintendo. There's really no need for a new console if the current one still sells over 200k weekly.
Wonder if AMD would be able to still this one from Nvidia.
Nvidia Tegra line of product have received decreasing love from them for quite a while, cancelling their latest successor in 2022 and replacing it with a new one not set to release before 2025.
While AMD seems to have an increase focus for low power GPU.
ps. I'm specifically speaking of the GPU part, the CPU is likely to remain ARM
Probably be AMD anyway, Nvidia have gone loopy on prices.
Wrong. It will be Nvidia
There is no confirmation of any SoC vendor. NVidia is considered the most likely vendor but acting as this is verified fact is nuts.
I haven't bought a Switch yet and at this point I think I'd rather wait lol
Well you have missed out on a great system. Its never too late though and there is lots to explore on it.
I'd probably buy one if they made one that was a dedicated console-ized version of the hardware. I don't prefer to pay for an included screen that I may never use, and the form factor of a docked Switch isn't to my liking. And the hardware feels overpriced for a 6 year old system with an 8 year old GPU.
I do want to play Advance Wars 1&2, but not enough given the above disadvantages.
Wait to see if the successor is backwards compatible. You never know nowadays...
Better wait. Switch is just too weak, buy Nintendo next gen console and enjoy better hardware. Prety sure it's gonna be close to PS4PRO in performance, weaker on paper, but better techs like DLSS giving it great benefits.
I mean Switch is definitely not "just too weak". It plays Switch games fine and they are great and look great. Switch's power is not a reason to get or not get the Switch. Just depends if he wants to wait until the next gen comes out and then he can go back and get Switch games to play on it.
Yeah if they don't do a price cut not much point now, assuming next gen is backwards compatible. The Switch library is insanely good but you can also pick some of the games up to play on Switch 2 unless Nintendo decides to shoot itself in the head and not do backwards compatibility lol
