While Nintendo has officially confirmed that the second-generation Switch console is on its way, there’s no more details given beyond that. Recently, the company has given a small but important update on its Switch successor: it will be backwards compatible with the original model’s software.
Nintendo Switch 2 Is Backwards Compatible
This announcement is made by Shuntaro Furukawa, President of Nintendo via a post on X (Twitter): “At today’s Corporate Management Policy Briefing, we announced that Nintendo Switch software will also be playable on the successor to Nintendo Switch. Nintendo Switch Online will be available on the successor to Nintendo Switch as well,” the post reads. He also noted that more details “will be announced at a later date.”
While most may be slightly disappointed to find the recent Nintendo product announcement turning out to be just an alarm clock, this is perhaps a promising news to further strengthen Nintendo’s unique gaming ecosystem. However, the burning question remains – what will be powering it? To that end, the company is still keeping its lips firmly zipped, and leaks aren’t providing much information at this point either.
But here’s what we know thus far. The next-gen Switch is rumored to be once again powered by NVIDIA’s hardware, specifically a design based on “Tegra T239”, though its internals aren’t exactly the latest-and-greatest by today’s standards.
Still, Switch isn’t known for compute power after all – but expect some fairly decent horsepower inside courtesy of 1,536 CUDA cores based on Ampere (RTX 30 series) architecture, which will magnitudes faster than the mere 256 Maxwell-based CUDA cores (GTX 700 series) current Switch can offer. It’ll likely feature some form of upscaling as well, since Ampere GPUs already pack the necessary hardware to do so.
Pokdepinion: That’s good news.
