Persistent rumors suggest that the "Switch Pro", or whatever it'll wind up being called, is going to stick with the existing "Tegra X1" variant currently in the "Lite", but then somehow supplement it with a "Realtek UHD SoC". Wondering what exactly that means, I did some digging.

My initial reaction to these rumors was that the Tegra portion of the system would remain for backwards compatibility purposes only-- but it appears as though my assumption was not quite right.

I found two Realtek press releases, both discussing a pair of chips-- RTD1319 and RTD1311-- which have silicon for video signal encoding and decoding at 4K, with HDR. They don't appear to have any kind of 3D processing at all: meaning, the chips are strictly for producing video output, not for doing any kind of actual rendering.

This leads me to believe then that rather than introduce faster hardware-- like any of the plethora of more modern Tegra designs, including one even based on Ampere-- Nintendo will simply feed the system's existing output into this new chip, which will do some kind of fancy upscaling, perhaps even adding HDR somehow.

Of course, this would be pretty lame in a couple of ways: first, it wouldn't increase the capabilities of the hardware at all-- so framerates would still be rubbish, and this new chip would be upscaling blurry messes with some kind of sharpening, I suppose; second, this setup would preclude the use of DLSS, which is something people have been hoping for in a new Switch model.