Over the past couple of weeks, the leaks surrounding Nintendo’s successor to the Switch have become more like a dam bursting, with everything from the console’s design to its supposed motherboard being leaked online. Now, a new rumour from a post on Famiboards by data miner and leaker ZachyCatGames, as spotted by TGP, suggests that the Switch 2’s GPU clock speeds could surpass 560 MHz, hitting 1.72 Teraflops of performance in portable mode and over 1000 MHz cock speeds and 3.09 TFLOPS in docked mode.

For comparison, Valve’s Steam deck – an almost three-year-old console – outputs a total of 1.6 TFLOPS while the base PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X hit 10.3 and 12.1 TFLOPS, respectively. These numbers for the Switch 2 should be taken with a grain of salt as we can’t be certain of their validity. Furthermore, TFLOPS aren’t the most reliable metric when it comes to gauging a console’s overall performance capabilities. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to see these numbers compared to current consoles. If they were to be taken at face value, it does give further credence to the idea that Nintendo’s priority is never power.

To clarify, the Steam Deck is still a modestly powerful console capable of playing many modern AAA titles. However, its age is certainly showing. This video shows the handheld console running Black Myth: Wukong, arguably one of the most demanding PC titles currently available, struggling to hit a consistent 30fps on the lowest settings. Sure, being able to run such a graphically high-end title on the Deck is a feat in and of itself, however, the Switch 2 will be releasing in a year that’s going to be flooded with incredibly performant PC handhelds, some of which are leaps and bounds more powerful than the Steam Deck and capable of running something like Wukong at higher frames with better fidelity.

That being said, Nintendo’s competition is not within the PC market–it’s barely competing within the console market. Nintendo’s priority for handhelds has always been about portability, affordability, battery life, and creating incredibly polished games whose primary features don’t surround pixel count. The Switch 2 is rumoured to be announced sometime this week, according to Tom Warren from The Verge, so we’ll see if all of these leaks will turn out to be true when Nintendo finally reveal the long-awaited successor to one of their most successful consoles.