A US legal patent, filed by Nintendo in July 2023 and made public on December 31, 2024, has revealed an interesting new feature that can be used in the Switch 2. The console, which has yet to be officially unveiled but remains a great mystery inside the video game industry could play games with higher visual quality And with better performance if the patented technology is implemented.
The patent is for “systems and methods for machine-learned image conversions,” which you may recognize as sounding similar in function to Nvidia’s DLSS technology, and to PlayStation’s PSSR upscaling technology. This machine learning method allows hardware, in layman’s terms, to fill in the gaps in video game graphics. It can generate the images you see at higher resolutions, without necessarily needing the hardware such images normally require.
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This increase in visual quality also comes without the performance you would normally expect. All in all, it is a useful piece of technology. Particularly for the Switch 2 – which is widely considered not to be as powerful as modern rival consoles from Microsoft and PlayStation – and which could benefit enormously from being able to squeeze more out of the processing power it does have.
The patent itself, which you can read hereis quite technical in its descriptions and illustrative diagrams. However, if you take the time to read through it, there are interesting tidbits scattered throughout. If Accessibility consultant Laura Kate Dale points to BlueskyAccording to the patent, this technology could reduce the size of games so that they fit better on smaller capacity physical media. Laura correctly connects to Switch carts, which currently have a maximum capacity of 32 GB. Machine learning image conversions can allow “larger” games to fit natively on smaller capacity physical hardware.
This isn’t the first nifty feature we know Nintendo is working on either, as it previously confirmed that backwards compatibility was coming to the console, which makes sense given the Switch’s massive library of exclusive titles.
The only thing that really needs to happen is an official reveal of the Switch 2 at some point. What else do you hope the Switch 2 comes with? Any dream features? Let us know!