It's hard to believe that the Nintendo Switch is nine-years-old. Yes, it could do with a slight boost - particularly in the framerate department - but it certainly holds up well given its age.
Given that Xbox and PlayStation tend to launch new consoles roughly every six years, you can understand why there's been so much noise regarding when Nintendo will finally drop a successor to its own nine-year-old console.
We began to get suspicious last month when Pokémon Legends Z-A revealed it would launch on "Nintendo Switch systems in 2025," suggesting a possible cross-gen release.
Nintendo president, Shuntaro Furukawa has since taken to social media to reveal exactly what's going on: "This is Furukawa, President of Nintendo. We will make an announcement about the successor to Nintendo Switch within this fiscal year."
"It will have been over nine years since we announced the existence of Nintendo Switch back in March 2015. We will be holding a Nintendo Direct this June regarding the Nintendo Switch software lineup for the latter half of 2024, but please be aware that there will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during that presentation," he continued.
As for that fiscal year Furukawa mentioned, that ends in April 2025 so we should know more about the colloquially titled Nintendo Switch 2 by then.
In the meantime, the console's possible specs have surfaced online. Whilst these are very educated guesses, I will preface that these specs are speculative.
Digital Foundry have suggested that the next Switch console could potentially output a 4K resolution at 30fps.
I hear you, I hear you. What about 60fps?
Well, it's possible that the Switch 2 could use NVIDIA DLSS upscaling technology to run at 60fps but that would drastically increase the price of the console's GPU so it's by no means a guarantee.
After a few tests though, Digital Foundry's experts added that even an output of 4K at 30fps may prove to be too ambitious, with that requiring over half of the console's resources to be focused purely on upscaling.
Instead, it was suggested that developers would likely aim for either 1080p or 1440p.
Either way, it certainly sounds like an improvement on its predecessor and that's all we can ask for.
