Nvidia is known as an innovator in hardware and software, both for their legacy of GPUs, as well as their industry leading work on upscalers with DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling). Surprisingly, neither Sony nor Microsoft has seen it worthwhile to take them on to make chips for their consoles, but one console company did. Today, Nintendo is reaping benefits that brings them back into the console race like never before.
Nvidia has revealed on their website that yes, the Nintendo Switch 2 has DLSS, but that’s not all. We’ll run down the details below.
While they didn’t name the SOC, they did confirm that the Nvidia chip in the Switch 2 has a custom Nvidia GPU. That GPU has both rt cores and tensor cores, matching technology they provide in their full scale Nvidia PC GPUs.
The RT cores, as you may have already guessed, provide real-time ray tracing, which Nvidia describes as “lifelike lighting, reflections and shadows for more immersive worlds.” Given the necessary limitations of the technology, we expect that performance testers will find that this is not at the level of path tracing, which provides a far more accurate level of lighting. Nonetheless, it’s impressive that ray tracing is finally arriving to a Nintendo platform at all.
Subsequently, the tensor cores are what powers DLSS. Nvidia touts that the Switch 2’s tensor cores have enough power to run games on handheld mode to up to 120 FPS, while it powers docked mode to up to 4K.
Nvidia makes it a point to declare that the DLSS technology is AI powered, but we can consider this a buzzword more than anything else. Seeing as Nvidia didn’t mention that the Switch 2 chip has an NPU, the kind of processor that specializes in AI modeling technology like Chat-GPT, it’s doubtful that it has that kind of AI technology built into the console as well.
The tensor cores also run the AI technologies that enable face tracking and background removal. Once again, these are technologies that existed before Chat-GPT, as we have gotten used to them in videoconferencing programs like Zoom during the lockdown phase of the pandemic.
Nvidia also revealed that the Switch 2 is the first video game console that supports their VRR technology, G-Sync. This is interesting, because the market for monitors moved to mostly adopt AMD’s VRR standard, FreeSync, to the point that it seemed like Nvidia themselves lost interest.
There are still a lot of G-Sync monitors, and monitors and screens compatible with G-Sync, so Switch 2 users who want to get the most out of the console, just like PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC owners, will now have to look for those specialized screens.
We assume even the most hardcore of gamers don’t understand VRR, and may not know they’re not actually using it because they have the wrong screen. Suffice to say, a smart Nintendo Switch 2 user can hypothetically get their console to perform better than a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X|S, assuming they have all of this locked down.
Nvidia’s last boast is that the Switch 2 has 10 x the graphics performance of the Switch. After seeing the games they’ve shown off in the Switch 2 Direct, we can certainly believe it.
While it’s clearly not possible for Nvidia to have inserted their most performant RTX 5090 hardware into the Switch 2, it’s easy to see that they have something to prove here vs. AMD. The Switch can clearly run games on the current 9th generation, just like the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. Nvidia has a vested interest in proving that they have made Nintendo competitive with Sony and Microsoft, with the subtext that it proves their technology is superior to AMD’s.
We’re sure Nintendo knows what they entered into as well. Nvidia is a leader in developing the convolutional neural network technology that Nintendo patented last March. Nintendo may be showing off their all-audiences oriented games in Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza first, but make no mistake. We have probably returned to the era of console parity, where we can get the same games at the same quality appearing on all three consoles at the same time.
