When the Switch 2 gaming console was announced, the company did not reveal its full specifications. However, unofficial sources revealed that the device is based on the Nvidia Tegra T239 chip with Ampere architecture graphics. Now, more details about this hardware platform have emerged, allowing us to conduct a preliminary assessment of the upcoming console’s performance.
Image source: Kurnal, videocardz.com
Chinese enthusiasts Kurnarl and Geekerwan were able to purchase an engineering sample of a motherboard with the Nvidia Tegra T239 hardware platform installed on it. As reported by VideoCardz, the board was purchased on the secondary market for 1,000 yuan (about $138), where it is not uncommon to find versions of components from AMD and Intel that have not yet been released.
The board turned out to be non-functional – it turns on, but does not display an image. Presumably, this is a defective sample intended for disposal, which for some reason was not destroyed. However, this was enough for a detailed analysis. The chip was manufactured in 2024, and the board itself is equipped with two Hynix LPDDR5 memory chips of 6 GB each with a 128-bit bus and a speed of 8533 MT/s.
A die scan confirmed that the SoC contains eight ARM Cortex-A78C cores, 4MB of L2 cache, and an Ampere GPU with 1,536 CUDA cores. The chip measures 207mm², which is twice as large as the Tegra X1 in the original Switch. The design is similar to Nvidia’s GA107 chip, but lacks some components.
Geekerwan ran a performance simulation using an RTX 2050 graphics card built on the same architecture. While the exact clock speeds of the new chip are not yet known, the simulations showed that when docked, the Switch 2 can reach the performance level of a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti with DLSS support, and in portable mode, it can reach the level of a GTX 750 Ti.