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Nintendo offers vague answers on backward compatibility for “Switch 2”

Reading the tea leaves on what could be a key feature for Nintendo's future.

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A selection of Nintendo consoles that can not play software designed for the previous Nintendo console...
Enlarge / A selection of Nintendo consoles that can not play software designed for the previous Nintendo console...
Getty Images

Further Reading

Did the UK government just accidentally leak Nintendo’s Switch successor?
As we've gotten further from the Switch's early 2017 release, there has been a lot of chatter and speculation about the system's inevitable successor. And among Switch owners, there's plenty of concern over whether an upcoming "Switch 2" will be backward compatible with the thousands of games already available on the current Switch.

For now, Nintendo is remaining frustratingly vague on that key question. In an investor Q&A (partially translated by Twitter user Cheesemeister), Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa said that "while our company is always considering various specs for future hardware, I will refrain from making specific comments about future hardware here... Our company wants to continue offering unique ways to play with its integrated hardware and software business, so please look forward to it."

It's hard to read too much into that non-answer, considering that Nintendo hasn't formally announced any details about its next console hardware yet. Later in that same Q&A, though, Furukawa noted that "as for the transition from Nintendo Switch to the next-generation machine, we want to do as much as possible in order to smoothly transition our customers, while utilizing the Nintendo Account."

That's not completely new information; Nintendo said in a 2020 investor presentation slide that it planned to use the Nintendo Account for its "Integrated Hardware-Software Next gaming system" releasing in "20XX." Still, a new quote stressing a "smooth transition" and a legacy account management system could be seen as a hint that Nintendo plans to let Switch players bring their game libraries forward to new hardware.

Looking backward

Nintendo has a long history of backward compatibility on its portable systems, each one of which could play games from the previous generation in a chain running from the original Game Boy to the Nintendo 3DS line. More recently, the company implemented a similar chain of backward compatibility from the Gamecube through the Wii U, the latter of which could even play downloadable games transferred over from the Wii.

Games released in 1989 for the original Game Boy could still be played on Game Boy Advance consoles sold well into the 2000s.
Enlarge / Games released in 1989 for the original Game Boy could still be played on Game Boy Advance consoles sold well into the 2000s.
Andrew Cunningham

But Nintendo broke its chain of backward compatibility with the Switch, which merged both of Nintendo's hardware lines into a new "hybrid" platform. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Sony were increasingly focused on backward compatibility as a marketable feature on their latest Xbox and PlayStation consoles.

From a game development standpoint, Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto noted in November 2022 that in the past, software development environments "could not be brought forward when the hardware changed, and it would become impossible to play software released for previous hardware without making changes." More recently, though, the integration of those development environments across hardware has meant that "generally speaking, it has become easier to implement an environment where software released for past hardware can be played on new hardware," Miyamoto said.

Kyle Orland Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

Promoted Comments

I think a lot of people would just like a more powerful Switch, please. With joy-cons that don't drift, maybe some ergonomic improvements to them if they can fit it into a suitable form factor. It doesn't need to match an Xbox Series X, but as has been mentioned, if it could run Tears of the Kingdom really smoothly that'd be amazing. When Nintendo's own games are struggling on their hardware you know it's time for a refresh.
I'm having trouble envisioning what a replacement Switch would look like. The last handful of Nintendo consoles have all introduced some new interesting mechanic. The Switch though looks like it hit a sweet spot and a hardware design change seems really unnecessary.

More power and reliability seem to be sufficient. Same as phones or tablets these days. If we want crazy power we'll buy PS/xBox. The balance of portability with traditional console is perfect. Don't mess with something that's working well. Please.

Just update power, RAM and reliability. Maybe more storage, but that's not been a problem for my family yet.
The chip compatibility situation is further complicated by the way Nintendo's Switch software format packages a full Maxwell GPU driver stack and game-specific shaders in with the software itself. That means a binary written for the Maxwell-based Switch hardware would not work on a non-Maxwell GPU without a full recompilation.

Not being familiar with the switch’s development environment I think it’s interesting that they’ve got a custom driver stack in there and aren’t just using e.g. OpenGL ES or Vulkan. I’d assumed at this point that a standardized graphics API would be common for console development, so that’s a neat bit of trivia!

It also speaks to one thing I’ve seen commonly mentioned (and I myself have wondered why they didn’t do it) - nvidia has iterated on Tegra pretty consistently for the last decade, and so there was an assumption that Nintendo could easily include backward compatibility with switch games just by using another nvidia SoC.

Every time rumors pop up they reference the latest or previous generation tegra as the one Nintendo might use, and each one has been a fairly significant increase in capabilities from the last. Maxwell was the GTX 900 series, if you’re unfamiliar with the code names, so there have been 4 generations of GPUs since then.

The fact that Nintendo is able to pull off games like Tears of the Kingdom on such old GPU tech (and a small version of the architecture, too) speaks volumes to their development team’s skill! But also it may be because they’re not using a standard API that they can wring so much out of it.

Anyways, point is, that bit of information means it isn’t just a matter of replacing with a newer SoC and everything runs faster, as there would be work required on a translation layer, at the minimum, and they couldn’t necessarily guarantee it to work for all games. As was pointed out in the article. I just don’t think I’ve ever seen that mentioned before when someone says "well they could just use the new Tegra".

(For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegra#Models_comparison)

the Tegra X1 used by the switch uses 4 Cortex A57 CPU cores and a 256-core Maxwell GPU - not sure about the memory configuration of the system but X1 had 8GB standard, with 25-35GB/s bandwidth depending on the memory config.

For a while the Tegra X2 seemed like a very obvious choice for a successor as it kept the 4x A57 CPU cores, added 2 of nvidia's own "Denver2" ARM cores, and switched the GPU to a 256-core Pascal (GTX 1000 series). Memory bandwidth more than doubled to around 60GB/s, so between the added bandwidth and improved GPU it could have been +50% graphics performance, which would have lined up nicely with how the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X did their mid-cycle upgrades.

The Tegra "Xavier" and Tegra "Orin" followed and each would have been increasingly more capable, though likely at the cost of battery life even with manufacturing process improvements. I think the further we got from X2 the less likely a mid-cycle "Switch pro" refresh became.

That said, the "Orin" SoC sure looks like it would make for a nice lower power gaming platform, and there are variants of it that fit in the same power envelope as the X1 that was used in the Switch.

Really interested to see what they come up with next, anyways.



SoC here stands for..."system on a chip"?

Yes - what else could it be?

(Security operations center is usually all capital, so I’m curious what else might use the same abbreviation).

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