As one of the most popular hybrid consoles in recent years, the Nintendo Switch has been enjoying the limelight in the top spot of many sales lists and wish lists around the world. It has a solid list of upcoming games stretching all the way into 2024, but it is getting long in the tooth.
Launched almost 7 years ago, a replacement for the Switch is sorely needed – and based on reports, the next-gen Switch is already making its rounds among top developers.
According to Eurogamer, the console development kit was shown behind closed doors at Gamescom last month, with the tech demo showcasing the new hardware capabilities was a beefed-up build of The Legends of Zelda: The Breath of the Wild.
The report says that the game was running at a higher frame rate, making it look smoother running on the prototype hardware. The game runs at 30fps on the current generation Switch, so we could see a smoother 60fps version released with the new console.
VGC meanwhile reports that Nintendo also ran The Matrix Awaken tech demo on the dev kit. The demo was designed originally to show Unreal Engine 5 performance on the Sony PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.
So putting two and two together, it can be inferred that the upcoming Switch will at least support AAA gaming with no graphics limitations. Plus, the dev kit was also said to feature NVIDIA’s DLSS upscaling tech and has visual fidelity comparable to the PS5 and Series X home consoles.
With all the information here, we can suggest that the Switch 2 (or whatever Nintendo will call it at launch) will at least support high-resolution and high-fidelity gaming – basically, your games will look more lifelike than ever before.
Other information also seen online is that the new Switch will have 12GBs of RAM, instead of the 4GB in the current OLED/Lite generation. With more RAM, more texture can be loaded for the game, instead of the lower quality textures we can see in some games on sale for the Switch.
The question is, how is Nintendo going to balance the performance between docked mode and handheld mode? Power consumption on handheld mode is also something to consider. The nearest devices to a portable handheld console that can play AAA games we have now are the Asus ROG Ally and the Valve Steam Deck.
The ROG Ally can play most of the demanding games on the market today, but it has a drawback of having a short battery life as the AMD processor inside is pretty power hungry, and the device itself doesn’t have the best power optimization when compared to the Steam Deck.
The Valve device can go head-to-head with the ROG, but only at certain power TDPs. The ROG Ally has a higher max TDP at 35W when compared with the Steam Deck, which maxes out at 15W. So, in some games (Starfield or Cyberpunk 2077 for example), the ROG Ally can lead with a bit more fps vs the Steam Deck. It needs to be mentioned that the ROG Ally and Steam Deck are devices created to play Windows games, so they have more compatibilities out of the box.
However, if Nintendo can deliver similar graphic performance and good battery life to the two previously mentioned devices, we may have another winner in hand, literally.
The Nintendo Switch replacement is expected to be announced sometime in 2024, with the exact timing still up in the air as of press time. Don’t forget to check out our Asus ROG Ally review.
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