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Spec reveals are never easy. Months - sometimes years - of anticipation build after initial teasers. Rumours circulate, patent applications are scoured for hints of what the platform holders might be planning, anonymous sources spring up telling us exactly what we want to hear - and then reality hits. Recently, Venturebeat essentially reconfirmed a Digital Foundry report from July, revealing that Nintendo Switch is based on Nvidia's Tegra X1, featuring a GPU based on second generation Maxwell technology. For those hoping for Xbox One power in a portable, it was a blow. Uncertainty remains on how Nintendo has customised the X1 processor, but we can go one step further today in revealing how the power of the console adjusts as Switch transitions from home console into a full portable.But first, let's dissect the Venturebeat story a little and add our own flavour. In April this year, we first learned that Nvidia tech was 'inside' the Nintendo NX, as it was known then. Further sources came forward across the months to corroborate the story, then sometime in July, Nintendo of Europe held a large event at its Frankfurt HQ where the kit was demoed in action to a very large audience. Both Digital Foundry and Eurogamer now had all the confirmation required to run our stories. From our perspective, the next step was to push further and hammer down the final specification - but this was not easy.
In our story, we speculated that the March 2017 release would allow Nintendo to transition from the Tegra X1 to the more modern Tegra X2 utilising Pascal technology using a FinFET processor production technology, opening the door to better performance and/or longer battery life. Nvidia itself claimed that the custom processor in Switch is based on 'the same architecture as the world's top-performing GeForce gaming graphics cards' - seemingly a stone-wall indicator that Pascal was in Switch (all of the most powerful GPUs on the market when that statement was made were based on Pascal, after all).
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