It’s been a few days since the Nintendo Switch Online Playtest has ended, but dataminers are continuing to go through the data they acquired from it. And an interesting new revelation has emerged.
As shared on the GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit by user RinRinDoof, dataminer Watertoon revealed on microblog BlueSky that the Playtest has instructions to output to 4K, and it also has support for mesh shaders. This rumor was also shared by NecroFelipe.
It’s easy to see why the 4K rumor is surprising. Nintendo, notoriously going a generation behind the other console creators, does not have games that run on 4K on the Switch. Now, it’s kind of possible for the Switch hardware to do that, but only for their simpler games. So you can understand why Nintendo didn’t bother even enabling it.
The claim that it has mesh shader support is far more exciting. Mesh shaders are an advanced tech for rendering graphics, so advanced that Nvidia had demonstrated it in a 2018 Turing GPU demo, but it wasn’t even used in any games that have been released until last year’s Alan Wake 2.
You can read a more detailed technical explanation from this PC Gamer feature, but what you need to know here are two things:
- Mesh shaders will push forward the video game industry’s ability to make realistic graphics, in a console generational way, and that
- Game developers were already working on this technology for years. We are just about to see that work bear fruit in future games
So, remember when we mentioned a Turing GPU above? That GPU was made by Nvidia, the same Nvidia that makes the CPU in the Nintendo Switch.
And the CPU that is rumored to be in the Switch 2 is the T239, also made by Nvidia. It also has support for mesh shaders. To be clear, this information was verified by dataminers who checked the shipping manifest for components that were shipped to the factory that will make the Switch 2.
This information wasn’t sourced by leakers who gained a reputation by going viral with their claims on forums or sites like Twitter. These are people who directly went through the data themselves, and can corroborate their findings.
We can all put two and two together and conclude that mesh shader technology, which is so advanced that all the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S games released until 2022 didn’t have it, could appear on the Switch 2.
Suddenly the Switch 2 being able to output to 4K sounds quaint. When Switch 2 launches it will have technology that isn’t in wide use on current generation consoles yet. That doesn’t sound like a console that is a generation behind its peers, even if it will probably still have less powerful specs. And we can’t guarantee that most Switch 2 games will be able to make use of it.
Still, this claim is so incredible that we would want to caution our readers to be skeptical of this. After all, none of the rumors we reported that the Switch 2 reveal should have happened by now came true. Still, we report on these rumors, knowing that they may turn out to be false, because it’s worth that risk just in case we get a real advance revelation.
Of course, we do our best to warn you if we are uncertain about these rumors. Given that this information came from datamining, there’s a level of credibility to it that’s hard to debunk.
