How Nvidia’s DLSS could make the new Nintendo Switch better

You have probably seen the acronym “DLSS” appear in more gaming and tech stories recently. You should know that it is a graphical thing from Nvidia, and that it may be coming to the new Nintendo Switch console, which rumors say will be released in late 2021, according to a report from Bloomberg. But really, what is it and why does it matter?

DLSS stands for deep learning super sampling, and it’s a way for Nvidia’s RTX graphics cards to work smarter, not necessarily harder, running games at a lower resolution, then using dedicated AI cores to improve visual quality with less than normal performance cost. The deep learning component works in real time to make your game look as if you haven’t yet lowered the resolution. This feature works only with supported PC games, of which there are more than 20 at the time of publication, including Cyberpunk 2077, Fifteen days, Monster Hunter World, To control, and others.

On the PC, the technique has proven to produce a considerable increase in performance. Especially with the advent of lightning tracking technology, DLSS has been a blessing to allow players to experience all the latest visual effects on high-resolution screens without having to shell out an exorbitant amount for a GPU. It is available for GPUs that (nominally) cost only a few hundred dollars, like the RTX 3060, as well as the previous generation 20-series RTX cards (not that you can find any of them available now). For a device like the Nintendo Switch, which cannot accumulate so many horsepower to start with, you can imagine why it can be an incredible fit.

Nintendo’s current switch uses a scaled-down version of the system on a 2015 Nvidia Tegra X1 chip. Most games run at less than 1080p resolution when attached and generally less than the 720p resolution of the Switch’s screen when in portable mode. Switch developers are already accustomed to making some considerable commitments to make their games work well on the handheld console.

The work of the Panic Button in Doom and Doom Eternal, for example, rely heavily on visual tricks like dynamic resolution, motion blur and low-fidelity textures to mask the Switch’s inherent weaknesses compared to other consoles – and to make them work at playable 30 frames per second, even on the screen 720p from the Switch, let alone 4K. Other games struggle to get close to rendering at this resolution – Wolfenstein: Youngblood generally works with a resolution of 540p in portable mode, according to Digital Foundry – and even Nintendo itself The legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has a noticeable slowdown, although the company has some other brilliant examples that manage the gameplay at 60 frames per second.

With all that context in mind, the recent rumors that the next switch will use DLSS to help you avoid these compromises got me excited. We don’t know if Nvidia really plans to put an RTX-style graphics chip with Tensor Core AI processors on a switch just to get DLSS, but that would make the next generation of Switch games (and perhaps pre-existing games) look and function much better. , either in portable mode or displaying a higher resolution while docked.

Of course, games on the Nintendo Switch would probably need to be patched individually to support DLSS, as the relatively small amount of games on the PC has been. If games that support DLSS on the PC get a switch port, will DLSS work, I wonder? Or, as unlikely as it may seem, can Nintendo and Nvidia work together to make all games compatible with DLSS in some way to ensure optimal performance across the board?

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

DLSS 2.0 is the current version available for the PC, and has brought better performance and efficiency to the RTX AI cores compared to the first iteration. TweakTown quotes a YouTube video from Moore’s Law is Dead claiming that a newer version of DLSS 3.0 could be in development for GPUs built with the latest Ampere architecture. It is said to automatically provide AI improvements for any game with temporal anti-aliasing (a technique that removes the jagged edges of textures – especially when the camera is in motion), not just games that have been corrected for support. If true, this could make Nintendo’s job a lot easier, bringing DLSS capabilities to more games.

To get an idea of ​​how the next switch could benefit from DLSS without requiring extremely powerful hardware, check out this informative video below that the folks at Digital Foundry put together. Focuses on the game To control running with DLSS enabled in different resolutions. What really caught my attention was when it showed how good the DLSS can make a 540p rendering of the game look when reconstructed into a 1080p image with ray-traced effects and everything set to ultra settings. I timed the video for that exact location.

If that’s what a PC can do with 540p, a DLSS switch may not need a major overhaul to make its own sub-720p game collection look much better than it does today, particularly on the relatively small screen of the switch where small DLSS wrinkles can be even easier to forgive than on a PC monitor. If it gains additional graphics power, it is not an exaggeration to imagine today’s games running competently in simulated 4K when coupled to a TV as well. This kind of thing would be perfect to show at the launch of Breath of the Wild, Splatoon 3, or Metroid Prime 4.

Since the launch of the original Nintendo Switch, 4K TVs have become more widely adopted. So it makes sense if Nintendo wants to use hardware that will look better on modern TVs. And whatever the company chooses to put on its next switch, in the end it will still be a mobile processor with limitations compared to what the Xbox Series X and PS5 can do. However, hopefully, it will be enough to ensure that future Switch games will look much better than they currently do in the coming years.