Nintendo spends a shocking amount of time and energy antagonizing the gaming community.
And yet, I bought a Wii, I bought a Wii U, I bought a Switch, I bought an OLED Switch,
and I'm gonna buy a Switch too. Why?
Because nobody does what Nintendo. I mean, who else could tease an upcoming console with the performance of a generation
and a half old competing machine, and yet have the community say,
sounds great, because the games for it are going to rock.
Speaking of community scuttle butt, this may be the most leaked Nintendo hardware ever,
and on top of the official announcement, there is a lot more that we know, or at least
mostly know, that makes us pretty excited about the Switch too.
Let's begin the adventure of sorting through it all. It's dangerous to go alone, take this.
No way. Did we get a Switch too early?
Of course. Here's our sponsor.
Always masters of the roostertees, Nintendo gave us a mere 2 minute 22 second tour of
their attempt number two at a hybrid console. But while at first glance, you might think it was pretty light on the details, the keen
eyed have been gleaning a ton of info. Let's start with the good news.
In Nintendo's track record of following up their most successful launches with hyper
confusingly named successors, a simple two on the end of the name feels like a pretty
smart move, especially given that the vision for the Switch too seems to be remarkably similar
to the original, just in a substantially larger package that actually looks a lot like the
handheld gaming PCs that seem to have prodded Nintendo into action here.
But don't kid yourself, the plain black exterior is packed with subtle Nintendo charm and refinements,
like a better kickstand, a new dock and two USB-C ports, meaning better ergonomics while
charging and better support for multiple accessories without needing a dongle.
All without sacrificing the headphone jack. Now that is courage.
The new Joy-Cons also look great, the magnetic mounting mechanism looks way less finicky
than the previous sliding one, and thank goodness they're slightly larger for those
of us who aren't literal children, but still enjoy Mario Party.
Both Joy-Cons appear to have infrared sensors this time, and we've seen speculation that
this strange hole on the controller rail may actually be for a laser, for mouse functionality?
For a brief moment, the Joy-Cons were moving all mouse-like here, which maybe confirms
the leaks from a few weeks ago. I don't know, personally, I think it's more likely that it'll slot into like a cardboard
cheese grater for a minigame or something, but who knows with Nintendo.
Now exclusive to the right Joy-Con is the mysterious C button.
Its exclusion from the left Joy-Con leads us to believe that it controls some kind of
function in handheld mode. On past Nintendo controllers, C often meant camera, but it could also be chat, or capture,
or connect button for wirelessly streaming games to your dock, like the Wii U.
Okay, that one is speculation on our part, and besides, the only C that I care about
is backwards compatibility. That's right, baby!
You get to play your OG Switch games, both physical and digital, on your brand new machine.
Now there will be some exceptions, probably the ones with the weird peripheral requirements,
but even so, this is fantastic news because there is a ginormous library of amazing Switch games,
many of which performed like absolute dog s*** on the underpowered original console.
The only question is, how is Nintendo going to roll this out?
Personally, I'd probably just settle for more consistent framerates.
But I'd also be surprised, given recent industry trends, if we didn't also see
next-gen visual updates. But will they be free for Nintendo online subscribers?
Will Nintendo and other devs provide them as paid patches?
Or will Nintendo pull a Nintendo and lock these patches behind a full-price remaster,
forcing us to rebuy Donkey Kong Country Returns for the fifth time?
The last of the good news is that this video unintentionally added credibility
to some of the leakers who showed off not only the new shape in Joy-Cons, but also the specs.
That's right, while you should always take leaks with at least one grain of salt,
we're feeling pretty confident that this list will closely reflect the guts of the Switch 2.
Let's start with the GMLX30-R-A1 processor.
The GMLX30 is an SOC, or system-on-a-chip, that contains the CPU, GPU, memory controller, and the IO.
It's the beating heart of the Switch 2, and from what we know, it appears to be a semi-custom 5-nanometer variant of the originally 8-nanometer NVIDIA Tegra T239
from a couple of years ago. And if that's true, it is going to be a big upgrade.
I'm talking 8 tiered ARM cores instead of just 3, and a shockingly potent-sounding GPU
that uses NVIDIA's ampere architecture, like the GeForce 3000 series, with 1,536 CUDA cores,
12 streaming multiprocessors, and maybe even other features, such as an optical flow accelerator
for frame generation, and 8th gen NVENC video encoding. Which could add some weight to our
hypothesis about the wireless video streaming. Now, as for other big NVIDIA features, there is no
official confirmation that Nintendo will implement support for DLSS AI-accelerated upscaling. But
you bark my words here, guys. If the Switch 2 doesn't have some form of AI upscaling,
I will buy and eat an entire box of this Super Mario serial with Mountain Dew as the milk live
on WAN Show. It's going to happen. Rumors also point to the presence of 48 Gen 3 tensor cores
and 2 ray tracing ones, but I'm not eating anything if I'm wrong on those ones.
We were a lot more certain, though, about the RAM. It looks like we're going to get 12 gigs of
LPDDR5X memory clocked at 7500 megatransfer per second. That is a big upgrade from the 4 gigs
we had before at up to 1600 megatransfer per second. It comes with 256 gigs of UFS 3.1 flash
storage rated at 2100 megabytes per second. Not sure if that's reads or writes. And it looks
like it will be expandable using MicroSD Express, which is fantastic. It also has support for HDMI
2.1. Although, truthfully, on Nintendo console, I'm a little less interested in high resolutions
and framerates, and I'm a little more interested in support for variable refresh rate, which goes
a long way towards smoothing out games that are running at sub 60 FPS. And it should also help
improve power consumption in handheld mode. And I hear what you're thinking, guys. Cool specs, bro,
like your cool, well-fitting, blank t-shirts on Hiltodstore.com. But what do the specs mean?
Well, when Digital Foundry did their performance projection based on the T239,
what they projected was base PS4 graphics performance augmented with modern GPU features
and solid ray tracing support. And given that that lines up well with claims from Bobby Coddick,
former CEO of Activision Blizzard, who honestly, I wish we didn't have to mention it all,
we're fairly confident that that's where we're going to land. Not mind blowing for our home console,
but pretty exciting for a handheld console, especially one from Nintendo. Especially if you
look at Nintendo's track record of delivering exceptional visuals on extremely limited hardware.
Like, I can't wait to see what they can pull off on this thing. Speaking of games, the only game
shown was presumably a new Mario Kart with possibly support for 24 players, if the starting
lines are anything to go by. And all I can say about that is, it's about bloody time. I mean,
last time Nintendo released a new numbered Mario Kart, Luke still lived in the basement
at our Langley House studio. Outside of the video, we have three other games confirmed for
next-gen Nintendo platform releases, but after that, we are deep into Speculationsville. The last
new 3D Mario game was eight years ago, so we may see one of those. The new Pokemon Legends and
Xenoblade are due this year, so I wouldn't be surprised if they lined up with console launch.
Metroid Prime 4 is supposed to come out at some point, so switch two. For any degree of certainty,
though, we'll need to wait until April. But seeing as the Switch One had arguably the best launch
window in console history, and given that Nintendo clearly hasn't rushed this launch,
I'm hopeful that Nintendo can deliver another explosive start to the new generation.
As excited as we all are about the first-party titles, though, only time's going to tell if
Nintendo's ecosystem will continue to attract third-party developers. The Switch relied heavily
on its enormous install base to incentivize high-effort ports, and there's no guarantee that,
especially given that some games are clearly going to be cross-compatible, the Switch Two is going
to sell in such quantities. But on the other hand, developers probably won't need to run
their games at sub-540p resolutions anymore, and Microsoft has made no secret of their
ambitions to grow their software share on other platforms. And for that matter, we've seen hints
from Square Enix that former Sony exclusives like Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Rebirth could find a new
home at Big Red. In spite of all this, however, I doubt the Switch Two will see the same kind of
historic success as the original. First up, it remains to be seen if the performance jump will
be big enough to entice the masses. Second, many people bought multiple switches for their households,
sometimes one for the kids and one for the TV. And as long as the games are also being released
on the original Switch, and trust me, with an install base of over 145 million units,
that's going to be for a while. I'm not sure that those parents are going to feel the need to
upgrade consoles number two or number three in the house, at least not in the current economy.
And finally, the Switch Two has a lot more competition than the original. The original
landed in a completely barren handheld gaming world. It proved there was an appetite for
dedicated handheld gaming devices, but in doing so, since its release, we have seen a flood
of excellent options from other parties like the Steam Deck from Valve and the Ally X from ASUS,
both of which can run Switch games better than the original Switch can, which as long as the game
libraries overlap is kind of what the Switch Two does. At the end of the day, though, as someone
who pays for my games, I can't wait to get my hands on the Switch Two when it comes out later
this year, just like I can't wait to tell you about our sponsor. If you like Nintendo consoles,
you should check out our gaming console tier list. We have no we don't have that many controversial
takes, David. I think they're good takes.