In the months leading up to the March 2017 release of the Nintendo Switch, internet forums were a virtual wild west of untamed rumor and speculation. One of the most widely circulated rumors was the suggestion that the Nintendo Switch would eventually follow in the footsteps of the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4; releasing a mid-generation hardware upgrade to boost the power of their as-of-that-time unreleased hybrid handheld/console.

Now a new rumor that began surfacing Saturday evening, states that Nintendo is in fact working on just such an upgrade and that it will be released sometime in 2019.

Nintendo will be releasing an improved version of the Nintendo Switch early 2019. This console will have 8GB of ram, 128GB of internal storage and dynamic scaling up to 4K. Some third party games will only release on this version. All Nintendo produced games will release on both.

— Marcus Sellars (@Marcus_Sellars) August 18, 2018

While the existence of a revision to the Nintendo Switch hardware is still unconfirmed at this point, NerdBacon has learned a bit more about what is potentially going inside this supposed upgrade.

While there is no official name for the rumored Nintendo Switch upgrade at this point, we have heard it referred to on more than one occasion as the Nintendo Switch Pro.

At the heart of the rumored Nintendo Switch Pro lies an upgraded processor, as well as a move to a version of NVIDIA’s Pascal GPU chip.

Released in 2016, the Pascal architecture is the chip-set that is currently powering NVIDIA graphics cards such as the GeForce GTX 1080, on down through the GeForce GTX 1050.

Nintendo’s supposed move to NVIDA’s Pascal GPU would provide a competitive boost in the graphics capabilities of the Nintendo Switch Pro as it prepares to compete against new offerings from Sony, Apple, and Google within the next two years. One of the main selling points of Pascal was that the chip-sets Nvidia offered in gaming laptops were on par with those that they offered in desktops.

“The mobile version of the Nvidia GTX 1080, for instance, features the same number of cores, utilizes GDDR5X memory and even shares the same boost clock speed of 1,733MHz as its desktop counterpart.”

With Nvidia on the verge of unveiling a new line of graphics cards as early as this week, the availability and pricing of Pascal-based GPU’s may have reached a point attractive enough to make the move.

Is it already time for an upgrade to the Nintendo Switch? New rumors indicate that a Switch Pro is just around the corner.

While we doubt that the Switch Pro’s performance would be on par with a high-end PC equipped with a GeForce GTX 1080, the upgrade to Pascal along with the increased amount of memory should put the performance of the device somewhere between a PlayStation 4 and a PlayStation 4 Pro.

Nintendo’s move to Pascal will vastly boost the capabilities of the Switch Pro while running in handheld mode. A full 1080p experience while mobile will be realized when the unit launches.

Great care has been taken to correct the problem of overheating and cracking, which plagued a sizable portion of the original Nintendo Switch population. To solve this, a redesigned color system has been implemented into the Switch Pro to prevent this issue from reoccurring.

With this rumored launch of the Switch Pro, one of the biggest questions will be whether there will be titles that will be exclusive to the upgraded hardware, or will games designed to take advantage of the Switch Pro also work on the original incarnation of the Switch.

This subject was recently covered in an excellent piece for Eurogamer by Richard Leadbetter entitled: In Theory: Can a Switch Hardware Revision Extend its Lifespan? In this article, Leadbetter points out that many current Nintendo Switch titles are using scaling technology, which could allow those titles to look better on hardware with increased capabilities.

“[K]ey games are using dynamic scaling technology – meaning that the visual quality of games can scale with available processing power.

Nvidia’s Pascal GPU architecture is at the heart of their current line of cards, and could soon be at the heart of the rumored Switch Pro.

Titles like Doom and Skyrim (and there are many more) scale resolution according to load, but it’s a technique that’s definitely not limited to third-party games. Major Nintendo releases like Super Mario Odyssey, Zelda: Breath of the Wild and most notably Splatoon 2 have all made the leap to DRS rendering. It maximizes GPU resources, pushing out as many pixels as possible – and as we’ve seen with Xbox One X, it also opens the door to existing games simply looking better on more powerful, revised hardware released further on down the line.”

While the prospect of existing titles being able to scale up and take advantage of the extra power of the Switch Pro will no doubt be appealing, it doesn’t completely answer the question of whether there will be titles that would be exclusive to the system. In the past, Nintendo has toyed with exclusivity, like in the case of the New Nintendo 3DS; however, the company did not fully commit to the concept and only a handful of games that took advantage of that hardware were released.

The case of the Switch Pro is different. Developers have a lot to gain from a beefier machine and would be more likely to support creating games that ran exclusively on the Switch Pro, which would fall in line with the information broken by Marcus Sellars in the Tweet posted above. Ubisoft is just one example of a developer who could benefit from the potential arrival of the Switch Pro. The company recently cancelled a Switch version of their open-world winter sports title, Steep. On Saturday, company head Vves Guillemont was quoted in the Metro U.K. as saying that their hit tactical shooter, Rainbow Six: Siege would not be coming to the Nintendo Switch.

“[It’s] not possible with the technical constraint and especially the frame rate of the game; 60 frames per second plus destruction is a bit CPU heavy and Switch is not yet the Nintendo console where it’ll be.”

It’s worth noting that Guillemont said the Switch was “not yet the Nintendo console where it will be” – as the use of the word “yet” implies that the system is evolving – which gives credence to the rumors regarding an impending Switch Pro.

Another big question surrounding any release of a Switch Pro is what the impact the system’s release would have on the existing Nintendo Switch user base of approximately 20 million customers.

Fortunately for Nintendo, The Switch is young enough in its lifespan at this point that a transition to a Switch Pro model would not fragment the market too significantly. Nintendo could also partner with a number of retailers and offer huge trade-in bonuses for people looking to trade their original Nintendo Switch’s for the new Switch Pro.

Nintendo’s impending launch of their Nintendo Switch Online service in September and the ability to upload save data to cloud-based storage would play into the release of the Switch Pro, since the absence of cloud storage would render a mid-generation upgrade impossible.

While the prospect of a more powerful version of the Switch is absolutely tantalizing, we must stress that at this point, nothing is confirmed. If these rumors end up being true, the Switch Pro will definitely add an intriguing new wrinkle in the epic hardware battle that will begin to take place in 2019 – 2020.

What are your thoughts? Do you think Nintendo should release a Switch Pro? Or do you think the system is still too early along in its life-cycle to start thinking about an upgrade yet? Let us know in the comments section below.

Written by The Watchman

The Watchman is a journeyman gamer who has seen and played a good chunk of gaming history.
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