[STEAM] New Switch 2 specs show large performance dip in undocked mode

[Steam 0]

While Nintendo offered an

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for the Switch 2 last month, neither it nor

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provided many specific numbers for the upcoming console's raw CPU and GPU horsepower. Today, though, Digital Foundry is

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, adding detail and clarity to

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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 CPU and GPU clocks and memory bandwidth all 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.

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