Do you know how Switch 2 backwards compatibility works?

[Pemalite]

Bofferbrauer2 said:

Pemalite said:

Xbox's backwards compatibility is much more complicated.

The Xbox One actually included hardware support for some Xbox 360 stuff like texture and audio formats.
However they recompiled the entire Xbox 360 software environment, OS, API's, Drivers, the lot and virtualized it.
They also repackaged the games, they take the PowerPC code, reverse engineered it into an intermediate, then emulate for x86.

Basically Microsoft did a hybrid approach. They have emulation, they have virtualization, they have partial hardware support, they recompiled and they used a translation layer to achieve backwards compatibility.

Nintendo isn't doing the same approach here, there isn't any need, they are relying on the fact that the hardware and software is an evolution rather than a clean slate.

It still makes me wonder why Nintendo went with emulation at all.

I mean, it's still an ARM V8.x CPU and NVidia GPU, I don't see why they felt they needed to do that?

The CPU's are binary compatible as the A78AE is an evolutionary superset of prior instructions sets using ARM.
The GPU is where things deviate significantly.

Maxwell is grouped with Fermi and Pascal in terms of architecture and has more or less the same kinds of instruction sets.

Ampere on the other hand is related to the Volta and Turing GPU's which has significant deviations from Maxwell in terms of instruction sets... And that is where the issue lays and potentially breaks compatibility. - Myself and Fatslob did allude the forum to this issue back when the Switch launched that this issue may present itself with Nintendo's successor... That just because it still uses nVidia's chips, doesn't mean 100% compatibility is guaranteed.

Now Xbox and to a degree Playstation have resolved these issues by having a stronger software layer to make hardware nuances less of an issue to drive compatibility across generations, as RDNA and GCN share the same "break" as Maxwell and Ampere. - But Nintendo hasn't gone down that path yet.

With the Switch 2 OS being chunkier, I am hoping they have forward planned this for next generation.