Report: After many leaks, Switch 2 announcement could come this week
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not too much longer? Report: After many leaks, Switch 2 announcement could come this week Reveal will reportedly focus on hardware, with game announcements to come later. Andrew Cunningham Jan 13, 2025 1:34 pm | 56 The original Nintendo Switch is pushing eight years old. Credit: Nintendo The original Nintendo Switch is pushing eight years old. Credit: Nintendo Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreNintendo may be getting ready to make its Switch 2 console official. According to "industry whispers" collected by Eurogamer, as well as reporting from The Verge's Tom Warren, the Switch 2 could be formally announced sometime this week. Eurogamer suggests the reveal is scheduled for this Thursday, January 16.The reporting also suggests that the reveal will focus mostly on the console's hardware design, with another game-centered announcement coming later. Eurogamer reports that the console won't be ready to launch until April; this would be similar to Nintendo's strategy for the original Switch, which was announced in mid-January 2017 but not launched until March.Many things about the Switch 2's physical hardware design have been thoroughly leaked at this point, thanks mostly to accessory makers who have been showing off their upcoming cases. Accessory maker Genki was at CES last week with a 3D-printed replica of the console based on the real thing, suggesting a much larger but still familiar-looking console with a design and button layout similar to the current Switch.On the inside, the console is said to sport a new Nvidia-designed Arm processor with a much more powerful GPU and more RAM than the current Switch. Dubbed "T239," Eurogamer reports that the chip includes 1,536 CUDA cores based on the Ampere architecture, the same used in 2020's GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards on the PC.This might not sound terribly exciting for PC gamers; this is a four-plus-year-old architecture with fewer CUDA cores than the budget-minded RTX 3050 (2,304 or 2,560 cores, depending on the version you buy). However, the original Switch uses 256 GPU cores based on 2014's Maxwell GPU architecture, just one-sixth as many cores based on a much older design. The new chip will give the Switch 2 a huge boost, relatively speaking. Ampere also opens the door to things like hardware-accelerated ray tracing and DLSS upscaling, which Nvidia just updated with improved transformer models that should lead to improved image quality even on older GPU architectures if Nintendo and third-party developers take advantage of them.It has been nearly eight years since the original Switch was released, and the console's internal specs haven't been updated since it launched. Consoles manufactured after mid-2019 included a chip made using a newer 16 nm manufacturing process, which boosted battery life but mostly didn't affect performance. A rumored "Switch Pro" refresh with beefed-up hardware was supposedly scuttled because of pandemic-era supply-chain issues; the OLED edition of the Switch we eventually got in late 2021 had a nicer screen but the same chip as before.We know that the new Switch will play games made for the original, but we still don't know if that extends to physical game cards or just digital downloads. We also don't know if controllers or other accessories for the original Switch will work with the Switch 2. We should hear a bit more about these kinds of details after the console is announced.Andrew CunninghamSenior Technology ReporterAndrew CunninghamSenior Technology Reporter Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue. 56 Comments
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