Virtuos Devs Claim Switch 2 Has More Ray Tracing Potential Than Xbox Series S, But DLSS Needs Some Extra Effort

Eoin O’Grady, Technical Director at Virtuos’ subsidiary game studio Black Shamrock, has shared some interesting insights about the Switch 2 in a quick interview with WCCFTech. He doesn’t mince words about where he sees the console’s power, but what’s really most illuminating here is not the per watt performance of the platform, but what technologies can be used on it.

To summarize, Eoin said that the Switch 2’s CPU is slightly more powerful than the PlayStation 4, and its GPU is slightly less powerful than the Xbox Series S. However, as we pointed out, this paints a completely misleading picture, because developers will leverage the console’s unique qualities to leverage the console’s performance in some areas, if not others. This is part of what can make one-to-one comparison of games on Switch 2 frustrating; when CD Projekt RED revealed that Cyberpunk 2077 uses DLSS on all potential modes on the console, it embarrassed every performance tester out there as they simply did not catch it.

Eoin does make this declaration:

Any game shipping at 60 FPS on the Series S should easily port to the Switch 2. Likewise, a 30 FPS Series S game that’s GPU-bound should also port well. Games with complex physics, animations, or other CPU-intensive elements might incur additional challenges in reaching 30 or 60 FPS or require extra optimization during porting.

We think Eoin’s insights on other technologies are even more interesting in this conversation. While he argues that some games, such as Nintendo’s Donkey Kong Bananza, won’t need DLSS, other developers have to go through a technical hurdle.

Again, to quote Eoin directly:

…there are also other games that could benefit from DLSS, but don’t currently utilize it—that often comes down to how these titles are being ported. It is not as simple as taking the PC DirectX implementation of DLSS and running it on the Switch. Instead, DLSS has to be integrated through Nintendo’s NVN2 graphics API, and the extra work required for this might have been deferred by some developers for their initial ports.

This interview is the first public confirmation of the new graphics API on the Switch 2, called NVN2. We knew for some time now that the graphics API of the original Switch is called NVN. But perhaps what most interests us is Eoin’s comments about ray tracing. While Nvidia confirmed the console had ray tracing early on, we recently learned that Nintendo has been filing new ray tracing patents only for themselves. This implies that Nintendo intends to use ray tracing extensively, or at least they want to offer it to developers so they can use it on their games.

Eoin made this claim, comparing what the Switch 2 can do to the Xbox Series S:

On the Series S, hardware ray tracing for lighting has not been widely pursued as an option. That is noteworthy as the Switch 2 has less ray tracing power than the Series S, and DLSS may not significantly close that gap. Beyond lighting, however, hardware ray tracing continues to be widely used across all platforms for reflections and shadows. This is where I see the most potential for the Switch 2, as it has sufficient power to deliver high-quality shadows and reflections at reasonable resolutions and frame rates.

So we may very well see ray tracing in wide use in Switch 2 games in the future. Given that porting games to the Switch 2 is expected to be considerably smoother, and more feature rich, than on the original Switch, we may be seeing some impressive ports coming to the platform in the coming years. And the console’s comparative performance to other platforms may not be as important as the fact that Nintendo will move the range of customer expectations to a considerably higher standard.

Nintendo may not really be able to live up to Gunpei Yokoi’s philosophy of game and hardware development anymore, but on the flip side, their partnership with Nvidia may have brought them back to the dance properly with Sony and Microsoft after all.