As Nintendo gets closer to unveiling its successor to the Nintendo Switch, a recent leak revealed some possible details of the upcoming console. Following up on the leak, however, a new patent by Nintendo has been discovered which gives us more details about the console.

Discovered by industry insider Laura Kate Dale on BlueSky, the patent, which can be checked out on the official US patents website, reveals details of how the Nintendo Switch 2’s hardware decoder will work. It depicts a game’s engine seemingly working with a neural network to output graphics at higher resolutions.

Among other things, the patent indicates that the Switch 2 will have its own take on Nvidia’s DLSS feature, using a special chip developed by Nvidia, to run higher-resolution games than would be possible on current Nintendo hardware. Some of the examples in the patent filing indicate outputting 540p images to 1080p, for instance.

One of the more interesting bits, as pointed out by Dale, is how this will be used to reduce game size, fitting them on “smaller capacity physical media.” “The example given is that a game with native 4K textures might need a 60 GB download, but a 1080 native version might only need 20 GB (which would allow it to fit on a 32GB Switch Cart, the current max size Nintendo produces for Switch 1).”

While Nintendo itself is yet to officially unveil a successor to the Nintendo Switch, rumours have indicated that we will see the console announced some time before April.

Another new Nintendo patent published yesterday seems to yet again verify claims the Switch 2 will use DLSS style AI upscaling (Nvidia chip) to improve output resolution for games, rather than trying to natively run them at higher internal resolutions.

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— Laura Kate Dale - LauraKBuzz (@laurakbuzz.bsky.social) 1 January 2025 at 13:40

Perhaps the most interesting piece of this, after a lengthy read, is that one example use case given is explicitly to reduce overall game sizes, to fit a modern game onto "smaller capacity physical media", e.g. Switch carts, which get exponentially more expensive for larger cart capacities.

— Laura Kate Dale - LauraKBuzz (@laurakbuzz.bsky.social) 1 January 2025 at 13:41

The example given is that a game witth native 4K textures might need a 60GB download, but a 1080 native version might only need 20GB (which would allow it to fit on a 32GB Switch Cart, the current max size Nintendo produces for Switch 1).

The idea being to do a 4X upscale on the device in realtime.

— Laura Kate Dale - LauraKBuzz (@laurakbuzz.bsky.social) 1 January 2025 at 13:43

Posted: 1 day, 13 hours ago
Related Forum: Gaming Discussion

Source: https://gamingbolt.com/nintendo-switch-2-pattern-reveals-dlss-style-technology-to-upscale-resolution