Components shipments have been tracked that give clues to the hardware planned for the Nintendo Switch 2.
If right, it'll have much more RAM and storage than the existing Switch OLED model.
Eagle-eyed observers seem to have spotted some interesting new details about the hardware Nintendo will be packing into the Nintendo Switch 2.
We know that the new console is coming – Nintendo has confirmed that it'll be unveiled sometime this fiscal year, after all. However, little is known about the actual upgrades that it'll bring compared to the current Switch generation.
For a while now, though, members of the Famiboard online forum have been tracking shipments and customs data to see if they can glean anything from either, and it would seem they've just succeeded.
The enormous thread of discussion, rumours and reports now sits at over 2,800 pages of comments, but it's been sifted through by the team at VGC.
The relevant sections indicate that shipping data from March, now publicly available, shows shipments with new codenames that could be the next Nintendo Switch's components, given the contents.
These include a 6GB RAM chip which is believed to be installable in pairs, making for a new 12GB RAM limit on the new console. This could be LPDDR5 or LPDDR5X RAM, apparently, but either way represents a huge upgrade on the Switch's 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM.
Another of the listings indicates that the console will have 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage onboard, which again is double the capacity of the Nintendo Switch OLED, and way, way faster at around 2,100 MB/s compared to the current 300 MB/s storage.
All of this points to a console that will have a pretty enormous advantage over the Switch that we're all still playing on and enjoying right now – and these don't even get to the graphical capability of the device.
That's still something of an unknown, although the assumption is that it'll take a decent leap forward.
One of the biggest question marks hanging over the Nintendo Switch 2 is whether it'll use Nvidia's DLSS (Deep learning super sampling) tech, which uses AI techniques to upscale graphical output without as much demand being placed on the GPU.
If it does have that feature built-in, we could be looking at a massive improvement visually - but to really know for sure, we'll have to wait for Nintendo to finally say something concrete itself.
