That rumour didn’t last long. Stories last week suggested that the long awaited Switch Pro would arrive in 2020, with Nintendo bringing the fight to the next-gen Microsoft and Sony console launches. It all sounded rather unlikely and Nintendo was quick to dismiss the story. The current Switch range continues to sell relentlessly and there’s no substantial commercial reason for Nintendo to release a more powerful model quite yet – nor to go head-to-head with PS5 and Series X with what would almost certainly be less capable hardware. However, the firm’s partnership with Nvidia is likely to continue and three years on from the Switch’s release, plans must surely be afoot for a next-gen system. On top of that, looking at Nvidia’s tech is evolving presents some mouthwatering opportunities for a new, more powerful Nintendo console hybrid.
Expectations should be tempered if the plan is to produce a more powerful console and nothing more. Fundamentally, compute power in a mobile device is limited by the need to accommodate a relatively small processor running at relatively minimal clock speeds. If we get anything close to the kind of performance we’ve enjoyed from PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, we should consider that a minor miracle for a system derived from a processor designed primarily for mobile gaming. However, with that said, a new Switch based on more recent Nvidia technology opens the door to the firm’s impressive AI upscaling techniques – and I decided to put them to the test in scenarios designed to more accurately represent Switch-level gaming.
I attacked this challenge on two fronts. First of all, AI upscaling technology is already available in a Tegra X1-based product – the newly revised Switch Android TV, a tubular revamp of the powerful streamer that Nvidia continues to support and upgrade. AI upscaling is exclusive to the new versions of the Shield, and works on any video content running on the machine – the only limitation being that anything above 30fps content is not supported. And this led me to wonder: what if I fed the Shield with Switch capture? How would that look?
I also thought about approaching this from the opposite direction. We’ve been quietly but cautiously excited by the DLSS AI upscaling tech found in recent games – it’s a vastly improved proposition over some already impressive implementations in key PC games. As we’ve already showcased, Wolfenstein Youngblood performs brilliantly under DLSS and in some scenarios, the upscaled version looks cleaner than the native presentation. So what if we dropped resolution to the Switch version’s max 720p and used DLSS performance mode on the lowest settings? How would this compare with the Switch version?
The reason I’m excited about DLSS is remarkably straightforward. We want to push visual features to the next level with technologies like real-time ray tracing, but we don’t want to lose too much performance for the privilege. Fundamentally, why use GPU resources to paint every single pixel when AI upscaling can ‘infer’ a lot of those pixels instead? Wolfenstein Youngblood and other freshly baked DLSS titles are showing some remarkably impressive results and the tech has a lot of potential. If the performance uptick is substantial and the quality is there, it could also be deployed in a mobile device where compute resources are extremely limited.