New Switch 2 specs show large performance dip in undocked mode

Ars Technica 2025-05-14

While Nintendo offered an official spec sheet for the Switch 2 last month, neither it nor an accompanying blog post from chip-making partner Nvidia provided many specific numbers for the upcoming console's raw CPU and GPU horsepower. Today, though, Digital Foundry is offering what it calls "rock-solid confirmation" of the system's final tech specs, adding detail and clarity to years-old leaks and educated speculation on the system's internals (which turned out to be largely reliable in the end).

Unlike the Switch—which basically used an off-the-shelf Nvidia Tegra T1 chip—Digital Foundry says the Switch 2 is using "very much custom silicon designed specifically for Nintendo and for mobile gaming." You can see what that means in terms of raw hardware performance in the tables below.

Switch 2 Switch Docked (Quality) Undocked (Performance) Docked (Quality) Undocked (Performance) CPU clock 998 Mhz 1101 Mhz 1020 Mhz 1020 Mhz GPU clock 1007 Mhz 561 Mhz 768 Mhz 460 Mhz Ray-tracing 20 gigarays/sec 10 gigarays/sec N/A N/A Memory bandwidth 102GB/s 68GB/s 25.6GB/s 21.3GB/s

Switch 2 Switch Total System (reserved) Total System (reserved) CPU cores 8 2 4 1 Memory 12GB (LPDDR5X) 3GB 4GB 0.8GB

Switch 2 Switch CPU architecture 8x ARM Cortex A78C 4x ARM Cortex A57 GPU architecture Ampere Maxwell CUDA Cores 1536 256 Memory interface 128-bit/LPDDR5 64-bit/LPDDR4

Glancing at those numbers, it's easy to pick out a large difference between the system's performance in docked and undocked modes; its GPU clock and memory bandwidth both increase substantially when plugged into a TV. Those differences could help explain why the Switch 2 dock uses an active cooling fan, unlike the much simpler TV-connection dock on the original Switch.

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