In a rather surprising turn of events, it looks like the Nintendo Switch Pro (or whatever it’ll be called) will be based on the most graphics architecture from NVIDIA, codenamed Lovelace. This will put Nintendo a generation or two ahead of the Sony PS5 and the Xbox Series X|S consoles. Keep in mind that the AMD-powered consoles use the RDNA 2 microarchitecture which is quite a few steps behind NVIDIA’s latest Ampere offerings in terms of ray-tracing and AI-based upscaling (DLSS) techniques.
As per well-reputed insider kopite7kimi, the Nintendo Switch Pro will leverage the Ada Lovelace graphics architecture which is expected to roughly double the raw performance over the existing Ampere designs. We’re almost certainly going to see a sizable gain in ray-tracing performance (3rd Gen RT Cores) and an improved iteration of the Tensor cores used for the DLSS upsampling technique.
This, however, does more or less confirm the fact that the next-gen Nintendo console won’t be launching in 2021, as the Ampere microarchitecture from NVIDIA was just announced last year. There will be a gap of at least a year and a half before we see the successor to Ampere. I wouldn’t expect an announcement any sooner than early to mid-2022, following by a launch in the last quarter of the year or perhaps even 2023.
In terms of the specifications, we’re likely looking at a custom 8-12 core ARM A78 CPU paired with a 1,000-2,000 core GPU based on the newer Lovelace architecture. That means a hulking improvement of 2-4x over the (five-year old) 512-core Maxwell GPU that powers the existing Switch console.
