Figured I would post some graphs of GPU performance from my favorite tech site, so people can get a good idea of where the current gen consoles are at compared to PC GPU's. The above graph is an average framerate across a test suite of 9 rasterization games at 1080p Ultra settings, while the bottom graph is the average FPS across 6 ray tracing games at 1080p medium settings with RT on. This is the average framerate without using any upscaling tech like DLSS, XESS, or FSR.
PS5 seems to be closest in specs to the Radeon 6650, Series X probably around 6700, Series S somewhere around the 6500 XT.
Meanwhile, the Digital Foundry analysis of the leaked Switch 2 specs pegged it as a weaker version of the 2050. The 2050 is not on the above graphs because it is a mobile GPU and Tom's Hardware only put Desktop GPU's on the graph, but if it was on there it would be on roughly the same line as Intel's Arc a380 and AMD's RX 6500 XT on the rasterization graph and about equal to the a380 on the Ray Tracing graph, as user testing shows that the 2050 mobile gets roughly 40-50% of the framerate of the 3050 desktop on most games (scroll down to where the games that have been tested on both GPU's are). But that is the full 2050, Digital Foundry halved the core clock frequency of the 2050 from a 1477mhz down to 750mhz for their testing in order to bring it's performance as close as possible to where Switch 2 likely will be at if it's on 8nm (T239 has about 25% fewer CUDA cores than 2050m, so they had to reduce clocks by about 25% to equal that, and the other 25% reduction in clock rate was in order to hit the optimal performance/watt for the T234 at 8nm). So, we should be looking at something like 25% of the performance of a desktop 3050 on Switch 2 in terms of raw specs if it is 8nm.
However, there are a few points in Switch 2's favor:
- System level optimizations by developers that no PC port receives
- Switch 2 should have more RAM available to devs than the 2050m's 4GB, probably at least 6GB available to devs and possibly even more
- DLSS Performance mode looks better visually than the competing FSR performance mode, and will be able to boost framerates substantially
- While DLSS AI frame generation is currently exclusive to Ada Lovelace (40 series GPU's), while Switch 2's GPU is a generation behind being an Ampere part, it was originally reported that Switch 2's GPU has a partial Ada Lovelace feature set, so it may be able to use DLSS frame generation
It's also possible that the T239 chipset in Switch 2 is clocked faster than Digital Foundry based their testing around, especially when docked. They purposefully went with an extremely low clock rate of 750 mhz due to a belief that Switch 2 may be using the Samsung 8nm process, they said that any faster on 8nm and Switch 2 would get too hot and use too much battery life. If Switch 2 has moved to 4 or 5nm however, they should be able to clock it alot faster, moving it's docked performance closer to the full 2050m and also pushing up handheld performance and battery life.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 11 February 2024
