Nintendo has revealed how it made the decision for the Switch 2 to feature an LCD display, which many would consider a step backwards since the company had also previously launched a Switch featuring an OLED display. According to IGN, the company revealed during a Q&A session that this decision was made due to the advancements in LCD technology.
“Now there’s a lot of advancements that have been made in LCD technology during development,” said the general management of Nintendo’s Technology Development division and senior director of its Technology Development Department, Tetsuya Sasaki. “We took a look at the technology that was available to us now and after a lot of consideration we decided to stick to LCD.”
In further explaining his point about advancements in LCD technology, Sasaki also pointed to the fact that the Switch 2’s display is also rated for HDR10. For comparison, most HDR displays tend to make use of OLED technology. The OLED Switch also, interestingly enough, doesn’t support HDR.
“Even with the OLED version of Nintendo Switch, we didn’t have compatibility support for HDR, but that’s something we have the support for now,” said Sasaki.
The Switch 2’s LCD display measures in at 7.8 inches. In handheld mode, the system is capable of running at 1080p, and along with supporting HDR, it is also capable of variable refresh rate, allowing for frame rates all the way up to 120 FPS. These details, alongside many other technical aspects, were revealed during a recent Nintendo Direct.
More technical details were later revealed thanks to an update to Nintendo’s website, including the fact that, under the hood, the Switch 2 will be running on a custom chip that has been designed by Nvidia. Rumoured to be based on Nvidia’s Tegra 239 chip, previous leaks have indicated that it would be capable of computing power of up to 1.71 TFLOPS (trillion floating point operations per second) in handheld mode, and 3.1 TFLOPS in docked mode.
All of this will be kept alive when in handheld mode with a battery that weighs in at 5,220 mAh. Nintendo rates the life time of the battery to allow for anywhere between 2 hours and 6.5 hours of play time. This, of course, would depend on the intensity of the game being played; smaller-scaled indie titles would likely allow the console to run for much longer than a heavy 3D open-world title.
The Nintendo Switch 2 will be hitting store shelves on June 5. It is slated to be priced at $449.99 at launch. Nintendo has also confirmed that a bundle will be available. Priced at $499.99, the bundle will include the console along with launch title Mario Kart World. For more details about the game, check out our coverage of the Direct.
In the meantime, you can catch up on other things Nintendo has announced, including a host of third-party titles, the fact that GameCube games will be coming to Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscriptions, and even the introduction of the new Game-Key Cards as a new way to sell physical copies of games that might be too large for Switch 2’s game cards.
