NVIDIA recently opened up a vacancy in its company for a technical engineer specialising in game console developer tools. While that post may not sound as exciting to some, its opening hints at one major possibility – the development of Nintendo’s next-generation Switch console.
According to the LinkedIn listing, the role is for a Game Console Developer Tools Engineer, and the successful applicant would be able to work remotely. The job scope is, not unusually, quite lengthy: the individual will be required to write code in C an C++ operating directly on the GPU; create graphics profiler features for NVIDIA GPUs; implement graphics debugging features by reading and writing GPU registers and memory at a driver level; and work closely with both internal and external partners, including other peer organisations within NVIDIA. Among other tasks and labours.
It’s that last task we mentioned though, along with the requirement by NVIDIA that the engineer has some experience in low-level performance tuning and optimisation for GPUs that has some people within the tech and console community speculating that this job is for the development of a new System on Chip (SoC) for what could possibly be the next-generation Nintendo Switch.
Now, it goes without saying that this is all just hearsay and speculation, and nowhere in NVIDIA’s job listing did it state that the developer cum engineer will be working on a new game console, let alone the phantom Switch.
However, considering that the Switch is the only game console that is currently powered by NVIDIA hardware – it’s powered by the Tegra X1, while the current PlayStation 5 (PS5) and Xbox Series X and S are powered by AMD’s own custom Zen2 architecture – it’s hard not to let imaginations run wild over the idea of a next-generation Switch. Especially when you take into consideration of that the fact that the console is long overdue a proper follow-up, and not just a refreshed version with an OLED display.
(Source: Hot Hardware, LinkedIn)
