Nintendo Switch 2 handheld: Xbox Series S perf, with better ray tracing, console-optimized DLSS

Nintendo's next-gen Switch 2 handheld is in the news today with some new leaks from Moore's Law is Dead, teasing Xbox Series S console levels of performance, better raytracing, and console-optimized DLSS technology.

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The next-gen Nintendo Switch 2 handheld will feature a custom "T239" SoC from NVIDIA, which features 8 x Arm A78C cores, an Ampere GPU with 1536 CUDA cores, 128-bit LPDDR5 memory support with up to 102GB/sec of memory bandwidth in total. There are "extra little bonuses" inside of this chip, too.

MLID says that with this new hardware, the Nintendo Switch 2 would have the raw performance of the Xbox Series S console, but with better ray tracing, console-optimized DLSS technology, and enough VRAM to actually run modern games than what the Xbox Series S is capable of pumping out. MLID adds that's the "pie in the sky" outcome of the Switch 2, of what Nintendo can choose what they can go with based on the SoC that NVIDIA designed for them.

The media block has been backported from the latest Ada Lovelace GPU architecture -- a custom Ampere GPU will be found in T239 -- so it "should be faster with support for more formats, including AV1." Improved clock-gating is here, which is a way of improving efficiency from dormant silicon, is another Ada feature that has "somehow found its way into T239".

There's also FDE, which is the File Decompression Engine, similar to what Sony uses as the decompression block inside its PlayStation 5 console. MLID's new video states this basically allows for ultra-fast decompression of assets from storage and into memory. There was a recent report from Nate The Hate talking about a The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild demo running on next-generation Switch 2 hardware with "zero loading times".

The new T239 chip has the hardware capable to have ultra-fast loading, but it's "going to need a much faster storage format to make that possible".