Nintendo and its 3 rd party developer partners have proven time and again that they can pull rabbits out of this hat. Let’s be clear – specifications aren’t everything. This means backward compatibility, and the same power sipping, lightweight, slim device we’ve all loved to use over the years. So even if Nintendo decided to pull something “off the shelf” to power the Switch’s successor, it wouldn’t even need to move away from ARM. NVidia even has its own beefy SoC that plays on the same level – its ORIN class chips, which are destined to run Electric Cars and VR units – also meets and in some cases exceeds Apples own efforts. An Apple A16 chip uses less power, less GPU clock and is physically smaller than the X1 but puts out 4x its GPU capability and almost 10x its CPU. Even if you don’t compare it to any full-size consoles, almost any flagship mobile chip (and even some less so) would blow it away when it comes to output. Years of firmware updates, game engine enhancements and OS improvements have gradually chipped away at any sort of advantage the head start on the GPU gave it.
But it was that downgraded CPU that allowed the Switch to punch so much above its (literal) weight – it kept battery use low, and allowed games far above any other mobile title to run natively, albeit, with some caveats.įlash forward to 2023, and the Switch is looking and feeling decidedly… choppy. Not only did the A9 chip flog it at the time, with less cores and less heat, by the time Apple met and exceeded GPU parity with the A12 in 2018, it was almost 6x more powerful on a compute level. However, where its graphical output soared, its CPU was far less impressive. In fact, it was so powerful it ran nVidia’s Shield Pro, a device that was still getting regular updates and solid performance through 2021/2022. It sipped power yet was able to pump out up to 512GFLOPS of GPU render, double what the most powerful Apple chip (The A9, which powered the iPhone 6S) could manage. When it debuted in 2015, the Tegra was an absolute beast – easily one of the most powerful mobile chips on the market. Officially, the device (fancy OLED screens aside) is 6 years old, but the guts inside – nVidia’s Tegra X1 SoC – is almost 8 years old. It’s genuinely miraculous to think about the pure logistics of the Nintendo Switch.
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