There has been a lot of speculation regarding Nintendo’s new console in recent months. While we still don’t know anything official, Digital Foundry’s Richard Ledbetter decided to take a deeper look at the alleged specs. There have long been rumors that the new Switch could use Nvidia’s T239 chip, based on the T234 chip designed for the automotive industry. The graphics part is built on the Ampere architecture (RTX 30), which means it supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing or DLSS scaling, but not image generation. However, according to leaks, the chip should have a newer NVENC block for encoding and decoding, which is borrowed from the Lovelace architecture, this will mean support for the AV1 codec. Then the processor of the T239 chip has 8 A78C cores from ARM.
It’s almost impossible to get close to the CPU in a computer since we have to work with a different x86 architecture, but Ledbetter focused on the GPU, which he tried to simulate using a laptop version of the RTX 2050. While the serial number may ring a bell, the card is actually based on the Ampere architecture and is a stripped-down version of the RTX 3050. While it has just over 500 more CUDA cores than the T239, Leadbetter still overclocked the graphics to near the lowest level. could go – 750 MHz. The biggest difference is the video memory, the RTX 2050 only has 4GB, the new Switch should have a lot more total memory (8, maybe 12GB).
In Death Stranding, it was shown that at the settings used by the PS4 version, a heavily reduced RTX 2050 in native Full HD can maintain a fairly stable 30 frames per second. Using DLSS quality (upgraded from 720), the game could handle even 40 frames per second.
Cyberpunk 2077 was already a significantly more demanding challenge. With a slightly adjusted average preset in Full HD and DLSS Balanced (upped from 626p), the game maintained 30fps in most environments, but dropped to around 25 in more demanding ones.
Another difficult game was A Plague Tale: Requiem, for which Leadbetter had to set it to the lowest preset with minor adjustments and Full HD resolution with DLSS balancing. Somewhere the game handled 30 FPS without problems, but the starting location was already unstable, even when the target resolution was reduced to 900p.
Perhaps the most interesting test was “Control”. At low settings and medium ray tracing, particularly used for reflections and transparent reflections (settings almost equivalent to the quality mode on the PS5 and XSX), at 1080p with DLSS Balanced the game maintained a stable 30 FPS most of the time. Again, in some locations the frame rate was slightly below target.
Fortnite was chosen to showcase Unreal Engine 5, which uses Lumen, Nanite and Virtual Shadow Maps technologies. After enabling these features and low settings, the game ran at around 30fps at both native 720p and 1080p with DLSS Performance (upscaled from 540p), but the frame rate was never completely stable and stuttering was observed during gameplay , which, however, is worrying. even more powerful devices.
Ledbetter’s conclusion is that the T239 chip can handle new games, at least in a stripped-down form at 30 frames per second, some with ray tracing. Additionally, PC testing does not cover optimizations specifically for the Nintendo console, which can work wonders. On the other hand, it must be said that the dream 4K resolution doesn’t seem like a very realistic goal for the new Switch, since DLSS itself takes a lot of power, especially on such a device. Death Stranding in 4K couldn’t even come close to maintaining a stable 30fps, even using DLSS Ultra Performance (upscaled from 720p). The more powerful T234 chip has a dedicated CPU block for AI calculations, could the T239 have something similar? A big question mark also hangs over consumption, as the chip will likely use Samsung’s not-so-efficient 8nm process.
Nvidia has created a new Tegra processor with Ampere GPU, equipped with RT hardware and deep learning silicon. It’s called T239 and will almost certainly come to Switch 2. Here’s everything we know, plus GPU benchmarks on the nearest equivalent PC hardware: https://t.co/33MAiE57PW pic.twitter.com/1YqVpbmTA5
— Digital Foundry (@digitalfoundry) November 3, 2023
Source :Indian TV
