Nintendo Switch powered by Nvidia Tegra, custom APIs

A few months ago, we wrote a piece speculating that Nintendo could rope in Nvidia to help power its upcoming console. Today, Nvidia revealed that it is in fact the brains behind the Nintendo Switch.

The Switch will use a custom Nvidia Tegra processor running on the Pascal architecture. This will also make it pretty simple to develop games on the console. That, and the new API the console employs.

“The Nintendo Switch’s gaming experience is also supported by fully custom software, including a revamped physics engine, new libraries, advanced game tools and libraries,” Nvidia claims on its blog.

“NVIDIA additionally created new gaming APIs to fully harness this performance. The newest API, NVN, was built specifically to bring lightweight, fast gaming to the masses.”

Nvidia and Nintendo developed a custom API for the Nintendo Switch, dubbed NVN

This bundle also includes a custom OS, hardware-acceleration for video and audio effects and a specific emphasis on the latter’s rendering.

Notably, Nvidia notes that this took the company “500 man-years of effort” to achieve.

“The development encompassed 500 man-years of effort across every facet of creating a new gaming platform: algorithms, computer architecture, system design, system software, APIs, game engines and peripherals,” it remarks.

The company didn’t spill the beans on the nitty-gritty numbers surrounding the Nintendo Switch, but we now finally have confirmation that Nvidia and Nintendo become the next big partnership in the gaming world.