Do you know how Switch 2 backwards compatibility works?

[Bofferbrauer2]

Pemalite said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

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.

Ah okay, I thought Ampere's instruction set would only be an extension of the one in Maxwell, not such a huge change. Okay, that makes sense, thanks for the clarification.