Nintendo Switch 2 Announcement Expected Today

I don't care too much about gaming these days, but I might buy a NS2 to play Mario Odyssey 2 and Mario Kart 9.

Note: Those games haven't been announced, they're two I really want to play, though.

NS2

Looks bigger screen too, I don't use a switch but my daughter does for Fortnite, I'm sure she'll want one

Just seen a preorder for 1p on shoptonet but no retail price, seen a few comments saying it going to cost £359.99

Mentioned it to my son today as he has a switch (albeit doesn’t play it too much) but he didnt seem too interested atm

I saw a deal for a sub 200 pound price from Aliexpress for the OLED Switch on the other shopping website. Decent price for a brand new model designed to retail in Hong Kong so UK plugs etc but Chinese packaging and shipped from the UK so no extra VAT. Even my tablet can emulate Switch nowadays although only just pulls off full speed in some games and of course it is playing Switch games in its portable mode so the GPU is right down around 100 Gflops. My tablet has about 300 Gflops performance but does have Vulkan compatibility. It has a lot more CPU resources and faster memory than Switch but can't match Switch for docked mode GPU Gflops which are around 400 Gflops.

I wasn't impressed with Switch when it launched and now of course its incredibly weak hardware easily emulated by fairly cheap devices. My tablet was £60 although that was a customer return from Amazon Warehouse.

I'm really surprised how many Switches have been sold but I realise its not about the hardware but the software. I can imagine emulators coming out for the Switch 2 fairly soon but only the very fastest computers will be able to emulate the Switch 2 I'm sure and of course they will only emulate the Switch 2 in portable mode where the GPU is likely around 400-800 Gflops not the more powerful docked performance level.

I am one of the few people who never got into gaming.Mainly because I have an addictive nature and knew it would become all consuming before very long.I understand this will be great news for many players though.

Not a huge amount of info coming out, the mario kart graphics have been analysed and some are impressed and others are not. Is it running on stronger development hardware or weaker retail hardware? The original Switch development kit was stronger than the actual Switch, there were multiple development kits some with 6GB and some with 8GB. The Switch 2 development kits seem to have 12GB, will it be 8GB for the retail model or keep to 12GB?

People want the Switch 2 to be powerful but really you should be careful what you wish for as battery runtime will be much reduced if its something like 1.6Teraflops in portable mode. Personally I'm expecting a sub 1 Teraflop portable mode.

Sounds like there is going to be another upscaled version of Zelda Windwaker and's pretty much confirmed its using the new high speed micro express memory cards.

US price likely $400 for the standalone package and $450 for the mario kart bundle.

I've never owned a Switch so I guess I'm sort of impartial but looking at the details of pricing it all seems to high to me and the actual underlying specification of the console they won't tell you. I suspect there has been some downclocks to lower performance and increase battery life at least in portable mode. The new Mario Kart game does look great but I'm not really interested in a £400 portable console with £70-80 games. I have a a strong interest in the gaming sector so shall watch with interest and see how it goes but its not something I need to pay for. At this point only the new Mariokart game interests me and I'm not going to buy a console for one game.

I strongly suspect when there has been a teardown or the console is hacked we will find the performance weaker than many predicted. For so long people claimed the wii u had a 352 Gflops GPU but in the end it was half that at 176 Gflops. Same with the original Switch people expected to be close to full speed of the nvidia chipset but again about half that speed. Instead of something like 800 Gflops docked it was more like 400 Gflops with portable mode less than half that.

To add to all that Trump is now creating huge tariffs for goods imported including from Japan and Vietnam etc and really aggressive tariffs on China. So what price the Switch 2 ends up in the USA is anyone's guess but its going to be a lot higher ultimately than the official launch price.

I expected it to be a bit pricey but didn't think it was going to be £400+, I was thinking closer to the £300 mark

I'm disappointed in Nintendo with this new edition. It is rather expensive and a big jump in price from the previous editions. I'm a big fan of Nintendo normally and have no issues with ours over the years including the Wii that we still have but this doesn't seem that great for the price.

If the Switch 2 is a huge success this will hopefully drive down the price of the original Switch so secondhand pricing will be better for those of us who never bought a Switch but fancy trying one if very cheap. I might keep a look out for a bargain Switch which will need to include the a few of the great Switch games.

I see the price in Japan of the Switch 2 is $330 or less than £300. A huge difference compared to many other markets. There has been quite a lot of resentment towards the pricing of games for Switch 2. Even upscale packs are charged for older games plus many of the new versions of older games the pricing is very high too. I bought a mini pc the other day based on a Intel N100 chipset. It's not very powerful but fast enough to run some wii u and Switch games emulated at full speed but most are slightly below. If I was guessing I would say the average emulation speed is about 60-70% of full speed. If you have a more capable PC then full speed not a problem and even 4K rendering. I can run wii u Zelda BOTW at pretty much full speed at a lower 960x540 rendering resolution (see below) but because the Switch emulator doesn't have the option to render lower and get a performance advantage I'm only getting 10-15fps which is just about playable if you are desperate. The N100 is only a Celeron class chip. It just seems unfair to charge for upscale packs. It feels like Nintendo fans are getting ripped off but I guess this is par for the course and they will accept it. Switch 2 has 120fps 1080p and 4K 60fps etc but these are upscaled resolutions from a much lower rendering resolution. Many people are basing their view of the hardware on those resolutions but the Nvidia GPU does clever upscaling at hardware level but there are still many artifacts.

This is Switch Zelda BOTW but I can only get 10-15fps. However the rendering resolution and output resolution are the same so no artifacts. If you play the game emulated on a more powerful PC at 4K 60Hz then it will be a cleaner image than on Switch 2.

Wow the micro SD express cards are expensive. Looks like something like £50 for a 128GB card. Also with some Switch 2 cartridge games only having the licence on so you have to store the game on the main storage or a SD card its going to get very expensive.

Switch 2 console with Mario kart £430

256GB micro SD express card £100

Games £70-80

Online £25 per year

Upscale packs for your old Switch games £?

It feels like it won't take long if you have bought a few games you have gone well beyond a £1000.

It's been confirmed the Switch 2 battery runtime is a minimum of 2 hours for intensive games likely less than that once the battery has started to reduce capacity with use perhaps 1-2 years into ownership.

However I'm not the target audience for this console. I didn't buy the original Switch and won't be buying this one but still very interested in the gaming sector and what hardware is available. The latest consoles I have is the Playstation 4 Pro and Xbox One X. I do intend at some point to buy an original Switch if I can get a killer deal with some of the best cartridge games for a low price and a Playstation 5 with disc drive when they are much cheaper. I don't think I will bother with a Xbox Series X unless I find one super cheap. I really like the mini PC form factor and some of those are quite capable and amazing value compared to consoles. Some of the Ryzen mini pcs are brilliant for performance at higher pricing. My Intel based N100 mini pc with 12GB RAM, 512GB SSD storage was £76 delivered from aliexpress (possibly less than £70 if topcashback pays out). That will emulate everything before the PS3/360/wii u/Switch at full speed and make a stab at running those later consoles at full speed for some games or with reduced visual fidelity. Obviously no chance of emulating the later consoles like PS4/Xbox One or later.

However Switch 2 costs feel astronomical to me and people's debt levels excluding mortgages have almost doubled since 2015. I probably average about £400-700 a month and fully pay it back per month so some people are paying extreme levels of interest to have the latest cars, technology, holidays etc. So that average means many people have much higher levels of debt when many don't have debt at all. How much does it cost per month in interest if you are outstanding debt is close to £18k. I know student loans might be interest free though.

I feel the cartridges that only store the licence and you have to download the game itself from Nintendo are annoying as it means once switch off support you no longer get the ability to download the game and your cartridge is useless. Nintendo have given no information on how long they will support these downloads. I should point out not all cartridges are license only so hope its clear on the packaging for people that really some cartridges are no better than a digital purchase. What is more annoying is you may have to pay extra for these cartridges but to play the games they have to be installed in the console so very inconvenient as you have to swop cartridges to play the game despite being stored on the the console's memory or a memory card. I'm no fan of digital purchases but in this instance I'd rather have a cheaper digital purchase. However I guess its not much different to buying a optical disc with a game and then with all the patches and updates you still have a load of game data on the hard drive but still have to have the optical disc in the drive. However this doesn't seem as bad to me as you are at home with changing discs being quite easy. On a portable device I think it will be more annoying having to keep swopping cartridges. Also with an optical disc you still get the vanilla game to play even if you can't get the updates as a download.

I watched a video where it was stated publisher/developers were annoyed that only 64GB cartridges were available from Nintendo. I guess this is forcing smaller developers and publishers to use the key cards that don't actually contain the game itself just a licence key so you can download the game but still occupy your cartridge bay. It seems like the original Switch there was a wide range of cartridge sizes available to developers and many were small developers only needing small capacity carts. So its unlikely a developer writing a 3GB game will want to pay for a 64GB cartridge to put it on. It feels like Nintendo are pushing both key cards and for larger games with this move.

However in fairness many PS5 and Xbox games are useless without a internet connection. The games are unplayable unless you can download extra data from the internet so those discs are like keycards anyway. I guess the difference is many Switch games were fully playable from cartridges, with Switch 2 this likely will be much rarer.

I've seen a few further reports that Switch emulation on Switch 2 is problematic and games can crash out and have other issues. Those expecting full compatibility with original Switch games maybe disappointed. It could be well into 2026 by the time most Switch games have patches to work with Switch 2 and some smaller games may not get the effort to be patched and first release patches may not solve all issues. At the moment I'm confused about upgrade packs vs these patches. Is a compatibility patch just a stripped down upgrade pack? Will they remove everything from the Switch 2 compatibility patch even better frame rates? Will they make the compatibility patch purposely run slow so they can sell the upgrade packs?

I've seen some reports that the Switch 2 is only rendering in 360p in portable mode and DLSS upscaling is taking it to 1080p. This makes it possible for it to use far less power in portable mode and hence it can run for 2 hours at maximum performance on only 5W (the other 5W is likely taken by the screen). Definitely seems like a wider gulf between portable and docked performance this time around. It seems like docked is rendering natively at its higher resolution and portable mode is upscaled. This makes sense as the artifacts wouldn't be seen so much on a small portable screen where as they would on a big 4K television. I previously guessed 480p to 1080p upscaling but I'm not sure if the 360p is the lowest native resolution or it just does that occasionally to keep the frame rate up. My guess of 480p could still be right most of the time but under extreme load drops to 360p. However from what I've read there isn't a lot of difference in the 1080p output as the upscaling is so clever in how it works.

Switch 2 Gamecube controller is £58.99. It seems such a high price for such a controller and the spec it has. Switch 2 is launching with a handful of Gamecube games available if you pay for their online service +expansion pack which is £34.99, those are included as part of that subscription. These are not enhanced just emulated I believe so no different to playing them on the original gamecube or wii except video output quality will be better due to hdmi. I think a single member online membership is £17.49 so its a doubling of pricing in order to play these classic games. It all seems such a rip off to me but for Nintendo fans I'm sure they will cough up for it.

The Gamecube is relatively easy to emulate. I have a weak Celeron laptop of about 4 years old and that emulates most Gamecube games at full speed. I seem to remember Wreckless struggling and the Roque Squadron games are completely unplayable as they are the most demanding by far of any Gamecube games. However most of my favourite Gamecube games work fine like Zelda Windwaker and Mario kart etc. I'd say 70% are playable, 20% are sort of playable with reduced frame rates and 10% are unplayable either for speed or compatibility reasons.

Retailer news from France has shown huge demand for Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders. Nintendo Japan has stated it won't have enough stock initially there to meet all pre-orders but Japan has a much lower price of less than £300 so its a much more affordable console there. They have a pre-order lottery system there rather than earlier orders getting priority for stock.

I watched a recent video of Digital Foundry and they have updated their native resolutions of various games. Street Fighter 6 is rendered at 540p docked (DLSS upscaled to 1080p) and the new Metroid is native at 1440p docked and then upscaled. So we are getting more realistic information about the performance now compared to the hype at the beginning. This is no surprise as its got a power hungry Samsung 8Nm process (similar to Intel 10Nm (Intel 7) process with regard transistor density and power efficiency and it can only use up to 5W per hour. So now the real truth is coming out. The steam deck probably is still more powerful except of course it doesn't have the same clever upscaling. Maybe the steam deck can render at 720p where the Switch 2 would be forced to use 540p but the Switch 2 will cleverly upscale to 1080p clearly looking better than the Steam deck. When you think about this level of performance though and the huge price of Switch 2 titles it does seem extremely poor value to me but pre-orders have been very high and ultimately people just want to play Nintendo games I feel. The spec of the Nintendo Switch 2 does seem to be unfairly exaggerated in the media though.

Interesting video has come out about the Switch 2 spec. It's got docked performance at about 2 Teraflops but they have portable performance at about 1.3 Teraflops yet this doesn't work with the 20Wh battery and only getting about 5W per hour maximum for the SOC in portable mode. So I think they have that wrong because they haven't factored in battery capacity into their calculations only what the chip is capable of at maximum level when portable but those would be momentary peak figures.

Interesting that the fabrication process isn't even 8Nm its a hybrid 10Nm/8Nm (mainly 10Nm) which I guess would be ultra cheap at this point.

Many predicted docked performance would be 3 Teraflops, the maximum performance the chipset is capable of. I predicted 2-2.4 Teraflops and its come in at about 2 Teraflops so right at the bottom of my expectations. I still say portable performance will be around 600-800 Gflops so the Switch 2 can operate at a minimum 2 hours runtime at maximum performance.

As ever you need to adjust expectations when it comes to Nintendo. Profit comes before performance.

I'm saying that still very impressed with the Switch 2 overall except the pricing. It looks a great fun console but as expected spec isn't quite as good as you would expect.

Interesting that Nintendo are so annoyed about custom firmwares and other hacks that their terms and conditions now give them the right to brick your console if it has been hacked. I don't think anything has changed here except perhaps they will be more aggressive in bricking consoles this time around. If you hacked a console before I guess it was your mistake that could lead to bricking but Nintendo may well brick the console for you on purpose. However there are also some consoles that might appear hacked due to some glitch in the software or a memory chip failing and not working as intended and some people may end up with bricked console through no fault of their own. Admittedly this will be rare but you never know. The spec of the Switch 2 is much lower than initially thought with clever use of DLSS making up the shortfall so emulation seems much more likely and perhaps the safer option for those who want to run pirate games I guess but that option could be a year or two away.