How Will be Switch 2 Performance Wise?

[Pemalite]

Zippy6 said:

OdinHades said:

They could just release a "Pro" Dock witch some eGPU in it. Slam some mid-tier Nvidia GPU into it, sell it for the same price as the console itself and I think they would have quite a nice offering and most certainly a bigger jump than just an all new handheld in a few years.

But whatever, what do I know.

If it had USB4 or Thunderbolt it may be possible, but I imagine the Switch 2 is using USB 3.2. I say may because I don't know the technicalities of using an EGPU on an ARM powered device, I don't think it's ever been done before, and if it would actually be possible on NVidia's T234/T239 chip.

It would have been an interesting upgrade option though.

Latency is the killer.
USB is higher latency than PCI-E.

USB can take anywhere from 100-300 microseconds to do a single transaction.
PCI-E can take anywhere from 1-3 microseconds to do a single transaction.

In short, whilst you can use an external GPU via USB, you will introduce significant latency into the rendering, which will introduce frame pacing issues.

The technology world has moved from multi-GPU because of glaring issues like I alluded to above.

You are better off just making a bigger Tegra GPU and disabling half of the GPU whilst in portable mode which is far more feasible and efficient if you power gate that part of the chip.

Or just drive the clockspeeds up and down to hit various power targets which has been the Nintendo approach, thus the only investment they need to make is in the cooling.