Nintendo has reportedly shown off Switch 2 prototypes at Gamescom
Some reports claim that there is a Nintendo Direct even scheduled for next week, but that is yet to be officially confirmed. The expectation is that the Nintendo will present several first-party titles, including Super Mario RPG, Detective Pikachu Returns and WarioWare: Move It.
One thing we won’t hear about is the Switch 2, a sequel to the highly successful portable console. However, work is being done behind the scenes as rumors are swirling that Nintendo was showing off a prototype console to developers attending the recent Gamescom event.
They got to see a reworked Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which makes use of the new, more powerful hardware. What that hardware may be is unknown at the moment.
The original Nintendo Switch has seen several versions, but they are all powered by an Nvidia Tegra X1 chip that was originally released in 2015. Actually, some have the X1+ from 2019, which drops from a 20nm node to a 16nm node, but the performance is exactly the same (only battery life was improved).
This is an ancient chip with four Cortex-A57 cores at 1.02GHz and four A53 cores, plus a Maxwell-based GPU (from the GTX 900 generation). Also, this was paired with old LPDDR4 RAM, 4GB of it. Basically, any modern smartphone chip blows it out of the water.
But has Nintendo gone with an Nvidia chip once again? Or has it found another partner. That remains a mystery for now.
The Nintendo Switch 2 will likely launch in late 2024 with the first official reveal probably happening before that. For example, the Switch was first shown off (under the code name “NX”) in March 2015, the full announcement came in October 2016 and the console was eventually released in March 2017.
