After what seems like an eternity of hearsay milling and speculating, Nintendo’s lastly caved and given the world what it desires: an official view of its upcoming Switch 2 handheld console, which it says is coming in 2025—no particular launch date, sadly, simply this yr.
It’s finished so a bit of on the sly, too, springing it on the world through a trailer on its YouTube channel. What we see on this reveal is a bigger, extra stately handheld that appears, dare I say it, a bit of like a handheld gaming PC.
That’s due to its all-black design. A daring transfer—however not spit-in-your-face daring, contemplating the hand-held gaming PC market is now assuredly huge. It additionally flies within the face of some earlier rumours, corresponding to a 360-degree render of a case for the brand new console with presumably a historically red-and-blue Switch 2 inside.
Nope. All black, child. Just the way in which we prefer it—simply ask the Steam Deck, Lenovo Legion Go, and, er, effectively, we’ll depart the ROG Ally apart for now.
And greater, too. The unique Switch, for reference, had a 6.2-inch display screen. But we’re used to that 7-inch goodness right here in handheld PC land, and even greater in some circumstances. And with nice measurement comes nice duty to maintain upright, which is why the Switch 2 can have a kickstand to relaxation it wherever you please—that is a function I’ve personally cherished on the Legion Go, and I’m glad to see one other handheld take its profit severely.
The unique Switch additionally had a kickstand, in fact, although a largely garbage one off to 1 aspect. The Switch OLED’s was significantly better.
In addition to all this, the Switch 2 seems to have a smattering of different goodies which might be the remit solely of bigger units, corresponding to USB-C and three.5 mm ports. Lovely stuff.
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And don’t fret, it nonetheless comes with removable controllers like the unique, though these are greater to suit alongside the brand new upsized display screen. And Nintendo confirms backwards compatibility for bodily and digital Switch video games, so no worries on that entrance, both.
No official information on what {hardware} will probably be powering this handheld—nor how a lot it’ll price, sadly—however rumours have remained fairly steadfast that we’ll be seeing a Tegra T239 chip contained in the Switch 2. A current seeming Switch 2 prototype PCB leak hints at as a lot, and if that’s the case, we’ll be an 8-core Arm Cortex-based chip (1x HP-core, 3x A78 P-cores, and 4x A55 E-cores) alongside a predominantly Ampere (Nvidia 30-series) structure GPU, albeit with some Ada Lovelace (40-series) parts.
The unique Switch had 256 Maxwell-based (900-series) CUDA cores within the GPU, whereas the T239 has 1,536 of the newer structure CUDA cores. Lovely stuff certainly. If that is what we’re coping with, it needs to be greater than sufficient juice for what seems to me like extra of a handheld gaming PC than a console.
What can I say? You can thank the hand-held PC marketplace for this inspo later, console avid gamers.*
*Kidding, in fact. I do know we now have the unique Switch to thank for our valuable handhelds.
