The Switch 2 DOES support DLSS and Ray Tracing Nintendo & Nvidia Confirms
Share the Story:
Ninvidia features
Only a few hours after the 60 minute Nintendo Direct on the Switch 2 dropped, that raised as many questions as it answered. Nintendo filled in some, albeit small, gaps in the feature set we expected of the Nvidia SoC that runs inside. A Q&A session held by Nintendo in New York was attended by members of IGN, where in that session more details were detailed from the team.
Not confirmed until now, but expected of the Switch 2, was the fact the 8nm Tegra chip powering it is a custom Nvidia design. Meaning it comes with Tensor and Cuda cores and that means hardware level support for their own, proprietary, and industry leading Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) upscaling technology. During the hardware discussion event questions were asked across a wide range of Switch 2 aspects. One question, which was answered by Takuhiro Dohta, the senior director of the Programming Management Group Entertainment Planning & Development Department, was around the use of DLSS which IGN detailed in their article. His response confirmed the expected functionality, but not which version it will support. He said:-
We use DLSS upscaling technology and that’s something that we need to use as we develop games, when it comes to the hardware, it is able to output to a TV at a max of 4K. Whether the software(game) developer is going to use that as a native resolution or get it to upscale is something that the software developer can choose. I think it opens up a lot of options for the software developer to choose from.
Now, this not a shock, and is typical of Nintendo to not get into the details of technical solutions & features. But this does confirm that Nvidia have licensed their own, exclusive software stack, alongside its hardware to Nintendo. Recall, the Original Switch also ran on the Nvidia Tegra X1 Chip, no custom design and without access to any of the Tech Giants magic bag of software. The new SoC, a Tegra T239, that powers the Switch 2 is likely a 5nm Samsung node shrink of the 2023 original. Based on their “Ampere” GPU line (RTX30 series cards) packs a great deal of potential power into a mobile package and is aligned with a far more powerful Arm Cortex-A78C, an 8-Core mobile focused CPU. It has 8 powerful cores that will help drive the high framerates required of the 120Hz HDR and VRR capable panel the console ships with. And now we know that DLSS is going to be a key factor in helping it achieve those targets from 1080p on the handheld to 1440p on the docked mode, 4K is limited to 60fps but will still rely on DLSS to hit those lofty pixel counts.
We got a small piece of extra information from the same session, confirming not only Machine Learning power is inside the switch, but the power to trace rays is also present. Thanks to those RT cores from the Ampere iGPU, again confirmed by Takuhiro-san
Yes the GPU does support ray tracing, As with DLSS, I believe this provides yet another option for the software developer to use and a tool for them.”
The question was not expanded on much over these sound bytes, but it was confirmed by Tetsuya Sasaki, General Manager at Nintendo’s Technology Development Division, that their “Strategic partner” in Nvidia would be sharing more information soon on the chip and its full specifications.(Edit: Now confirmed in an Nvidia Blog linked here)
So there we have it, the Switch 2 may not be the cheapest but we now know it can run many PC games using DLSS and Ray Tracing, which makes it even more attractive from a porting and development process. And should help grow the market both from developers and gamers, once they see the games coming to the device. More to come on this over the next few weeks.