It will be a big burden on the shoulders of Nintendo’s next generation hardware (and because of that, who knows if it won’t go the way of the Wii U after the highly successful Wii…).
Last year, Nate the Hate hinted that the Nintendo Switch 2 (or whatever the big N’s hardware will be called…) will support Nvidia’s DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction, which, powered by artificial intelligence, will result in better ray tracing and could even be on par with the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. However, Frame Generation, or Nvidia DLSS 3, is rumored to be unsupported, so the improved frame rate may not be achieved as it is on Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4000 graphics cards.
Reuters reports that the new version of the Switch will be powered by a custom Nvidia chip. According to the news agency’s inside sources, Nintendo will continue to stick with Nvidia, as the Switch uses a Tegra X1. And the custom chip design could be a strategic response to the changing industry driven by content-creating (generative) artificial intelligence. Nvidia’s flagship H100 and A100 chips have long been used by tech giants (OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta…), but more and more are demanding hardware tailored to their own needs, so they are switching to their own internally developed chips (as Microsoft is doing).
Designing your own increases efficiency (lower power consumption) and reduces costs. This is something Nvidia is moving towards, while also leading the way in video gaming hardware (the performance of the GeForce RTX 4090 has yet to be matched by either AMD or Intel). We probably won’t hear much about this when the Switch successor is unveiled, which we recently wrote about the Japanese company doing ahead of the Game Developers Conference in March. There is another advantage to the custom chip: it will give Nintendo exactly what it needs from the “greens”.
Of course, this is not official information yet.
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