Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling technology would be misused to achieve this frame rate and resolution on Nintendo’s next console, according to Digital Foundry.

In the video embedded below, the Digital Foundry crew discussed how the yet-to-be-announced Nintendo Switch 2 would be capable of 4K resolution at 30 FPS. They agreed that it doesn’t seem realistic for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that it’s more demanding to upscale to 4K because it’s a much higher resolution compared to 1080p or 1440p, and in games it would take a lot of frame time. So 60 FPS would be impossible. Except that Nintendo is targeting that frame rate in most of their games, so if they were running their games in 4K, 30 FPS seems less likely.

Digital Foundry has previously pointed out that 4K/60 FPS seems impossible when you mimic the performance of Nvidia’s Tegra T239 chip (which is supposedly what will be in the Switch’s successor). Death Stranding was upscaled from 720p to 4K using DLSS’s Ultra Performance mode, which added 18.3 milliseconds per frame compared to the native resolution and would make 60 FPS untenable. Upscaling to 1440p, it was +7.7 ms, but that seems better. That’s why DLSS would be abused if the resolution were upscaled to 4K: half of the GPU “time” would be lost to upscaling, and so developers would have a hard time developing with that in mind.

So Nintendo’s best bet would be not to push the resolution too high (genre-wise, it might make sense in a turn-based strategy game, but what’s the point of 2160p?), but to keep the Switch successor at 1080p, 1440p, so that Nvidia’s upscaling technology is still viable and the big N doesn’t sacrifice frame rate.

The Nintendo Switch 2 (no official name yet) hasn’t been announced, but the big N will introduce it in March 2025, but it will probably be out by then.

Source: WCCFTech