Despite the shortage of components caused by the health crisis, the Nintendo Switch has been sold by pallets since its launch in March 2017 to the point of having already exceeded sales of the Wii and PlayStation 1. Available in Lite versions since September 2019 and OLED since late 2021, the Japanese company said earlier this year that its machine had reached halfway through its life cycle.
Obviously, after such a declaration, it was only a matter of time before the rumors about the famous Pro model resurfaced and that was precisely the case a few days ago following a potential leak of the DLSS source code. 2.2 from Nvidia. Like always, the following information is not official and should therefore be taken with a grain of salt.
A new Switch with DLSS and ray-tracing?
NVIDIA leaks have “nvn2”, which seems to be the graphics api for the Switch Pro, based on Ampere with ray tracing support and DLSS 2.2 pic.twitter.com/k6nEr31CcY
— Nikki™ ? (@NWPlayer123) March 1, 2022
As the American-British media GamesRadar+ explains, everything starts from this hypothetical cyberattack against Nvidia which allegedly took place last weekend. In particular, this would have caused the leak of a list of files allowing to access the source code of the DLSS in its version 2.2 (deployed during the summer of 2021), list judged “credible” by the Tech Power Up website.
What does it have to do with the Switch suddenly? According to user @NWPlayer123 who shared two screenshots on Twittersome parts of these documents mention the NX code name of the Japanese console and indicate that it would be “compatible” with the Ampere architecture present in the RTX 3000 series graphics cards, in other words with DLSS and ray-tracing technologies.
DLSS (or Deep Learning Super Sampling) is a technology for upscaling the resolution of a game using artificial intelligence. We can therefore imagine a Switch game running in 4K thanks to DLSS while it works natively in 1080p. This also saves graphics card resources and therefore maintains, for example, a correct FPS level.
It now remains to be seen whether this information, which it should be remembered is not official, is reliable or not. In the first case, do not expect the Kyoto firm to speak on the subject until it has decided. However, based on the communication schedule around previous versions of the platform, it is not impossible that the Switch Pro, if it is well in the boxes, could be presented and released in 2023.