Last week, Laura Kate Dale shared the patent Nintendo filed for a myriad of different forms of upscaling, that mentioned Nvidia and DLSS. We reported on some of the things we found in the patent, at least the ones that were described in plain enough English that we could talk about it. Today, we have some new upscaling technologies from that patent filing.
And this time, Digital Foundry’s Alex Battaglia talked about what he found in the patent document in the latest episode of DF Direct Weekly. As he described it, the first diagrams in the patent plainly describe Nvidia’s DLSS technology. However, as he read through the 31 page document, he found different applications that he had never heard described before.
The first patent he described a form of upscaling that isn’t machine learning. Later on, Battaglia pointed out a different patent, where if the device decides that DLSS is making the framerate of a game slow down too much, it could switch to a different form of upscaling on the fly. That second upscaling tech could be less advanced, and give out a less detailed image, but it would maintain the game’s framerate, prioritizing gameplay.
And for that matter, they also describe upscaling technologies that aren’t as demanding on performance as DLSS is. And that implies Nintendo and Nvidia developed these other upscalers to work on the Switch 2 as well.
We reported on an upscaling application where a game running on the Switch 2 could get upscaled with data coming from the cloud, which would have been downloaded via Title Updates. Battaglia found an application where a game running natively on the Switch 2 at a lower resolution can be upscaled on the cloud. Subsequently, there’s another application where the game itself is streaming on the cloud, and then upscaled on the Switch 2.
Finally, Battaglia describes deliberately shipping a game that can output on 4K to only run at 1080p, in cartridge or download form. In this way, they could save on the storage size. But then, an upscaler could decompress that image in real time, so that players could get that 4K image in game with a smaller download size.
Battaglia talks about being ‘shocked’ that Nintendo was allowed to file this patent, because of just how broad it is. The descriptions in it can apply to things small and broad, from textures, to images, to full video, and of course, to full gameplay. And it would seem that there must be other patents already that have locked down some of these applications.
As we pointed out then, we don’t know if all these upscalers will be used in the final Switch 2 that comes to market. But these technologies could definitely bridge the gap so that the Switch 2 could get newer, more sophisticated 9th generation games on the console. And of course, we can savor what it could do to the more complex games in the Switch library now.
