New Switch 2 specs show large performance dip in undocked mode

Digital Foundry also says Game Chat "has a significant impact on system resources."

May 14, 2025 - 18:16

New Switch 2 specs show large performance dip in undocked mode

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 CPU and GPU clocks and memory bandwidth all 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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