Just to be clear: Nintendo has not officially announced the Switch 2. However, the successor of the company’s popular handheld gaming console was reportedly shown off in secret to developers last August during Gamescom. Since then, more and more details regarding the rumored Switch 2 have surfaced, including its possible processor.

Overwhelming evidence currently points to the next-generation Switch being powered by the Nvidia Tegra T239, a custom cut-down variant of the chipmaker’s T234 processor used in the automotive industry, Eurogamer reported.

The T239 is expected to have an ARM A78C CPU bundled with a custom graphics unit derived from Nvidia’s RTX 30-series Ampere architecture that also has some backported elements from the current generation of Ada Lovelace GPUs. It will likely have 1,536 CUDA cores, a 128-bit memory interface paired with LPDDR5 RAM, and a max memory bandwidth of 102GB/s.

 

What makes the T239 the prime candidate for being the possible processor of the Switch 2 is that it seems to support a new version of the console-specific NVN graphics API that Nvidia used for the original Switch – the aptly named NVN2, according to Eurogamer.

So, are the specs of the believed Switch 2 system-on-chip any good? Well, we can’t be sure as the T239 is still not publicly available. But we can take a look at the closest counterpart of the chip – the Nvidia RTX 2050 – and get a rough idea of how it will perform.

Benchmarks done by Digital Foundry using a laptop with an Intel Core i7 1360p CPU, 16GB LPDDR5 RAM, and an RTX 2050 showed that the GPU was able to push out an average of 34.9 FPS at native 1080p during Death Stranding‘s demanding opening sequence. Digital Foundry ran the benchmark with the game set to its default graphics settings, which is comparable to the settings of the game’s PS4 version that struggled to even maintain 30 FPS at launch.

The RTX 2050 – the lowest performing Ampere-based mobile GPU Digital Foundry was able to find – was also tested on Cyberpunk 2077, but its performance hovered between 25 to 30 FPS even when running at 720p. In comparison, the PS4 version of Cyberpunk 2077, with its dynamic resolution bottoming out at 720p, often stayed around 20 FPS on day one.

It should be noted that Digital Foundry significantly downclocked the RTX 2050 from its usual clock speed of around 1350MHz to just 750MHz to simulate a true mobile gaming experience. However, this is still faster than the minimum 307.2MHz GPU clock speed of the Tegra X1 chip that’s used on the current Switch. Digital Foundry also used the 4GB version of the RTX 2050, but the Switch 2 could have as much as 12GB of total system memory.

 

With all this in mind, it seems that gamers are set to receive a well-performing mobile console in the form of the Switch 2 should it utilize the T239. In theory, at least.

While the RTX 2050 is the closest thing we have to a T239, the two aren’t exactly the same. For one, the T239 has 512 more CUDA cores. And Nintendo could even further clock below the 750MHz Digital Foundry benchmarked with.

Still, gamers, especially here in the Philippines, will be excited to have a new Switch no matter what processor it ends up shipping with.