The Nintendo Switch turns five years old today — five years without ever addressing the fact some of its biggest games tend to chug and don’t look great on a big screen TV.
I’m here to tell you that not only does Nintendo have a solution for that, Valve’s rival Steam Deck proves beyond a doubt that it would work phenomenally.
Let’s catch you up real fast. Last March, Bloomberg reported that a new Switch would finally throw power-hungry gamers a bone. It’d come with a new Nvidia chip and embrace Nvidia’s DLSS deep learning temporal upscaling technology for 4K-quality gaming when docked to your big screen TV. While it never materialized (reportedly due to the chip shortage) it got a bunch of brains in gear — we wrote how AI could make the new Nintendo Switch a powerhouse overnight, while Digital Foundry showed a convincing sample of what 720p to 4K DLSS upscaling might look like.
But today, we no longer need to guess or theorize, because Valve’s Steam Deck handheld includes AMD’s answer to DLSS right out of the box, letting you enable it globally across any game. And so far, I’ve found it’s an immediate, must-use feature for instant graphical upgrades whenever I plug the Deck’s 3D games into a monitor or TV.
You may want to blow up these images for a closer look.
This is what Elden Ring looks like on a 1440p monitor plugged into the Steam Deck:
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Now here’s the exact same scene with AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) turned on — which takes low-resolution frames of your game, runs them through an edge-enhancement spacial upscaling algorithm (based on Lanczos, if you’re interested), sharpens them, and thus makes them look notably higher resolution.
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Here, let’s crop in and do an image slider, maybe save you some pinching and zooming if you’re reading this on a phone:
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But now here it is at 1024 x 768 upscaled to the Deck’s screen with AMD FSR turned on, and not only does it look more defined, we’re getting notably higher framerate. Ugly black bars on the left and right aside, I found this more playable.
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For some game developers, this might be the more attractive use case, particularly since I actually saw a slight performance hit with FSR at 4K. But it’s also possible that if Nvidia actually builds its DLSS-powering Tensor cores into the next Nintendo Switch chip, they’ll be able to handle that load on their own.
It’s always possible that Nintendo will forgo a Switch Pro entirely, never release a more powerful chip or upscaling technique until it’s ready to announce an entirely new console, instead of risking that some people reject the new version the way they rejected the Wii U. And it’s likely that most games would still target the original, bestselling Nintendo Switch even if Nintendo were to announce a more powerful version.
But I’ll stick by my argument last July — Nintendo’s decision to announce an OLED Switch instead of a Switch Pro was an incredibly easy decision for the company, one that let it rake in profits instead of fighting for chips in the middle of a shortage, and you shouldn’t take it as a signal that the rumored Switch Pro is dead for good. And it’s a no-brainer for Nintendo to add the tech. Why let Valve have all the fun?
