New Nintendo Patent Describes DLSS Style AI Upscaling - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 02 January 2025 / 6,639 Views
A patent filed by Nintendo in July 2023 and published this week seemed to suggest the Nintendo Switch 2 will use a DLSS (deep learning super sampling) style AI upscaling to improve the output resolution of games.
Journalist Laura Kate Dale on Bluesky suggests "one example use case given is explicitly to reduce overall game sizes, to fit a modern game onto 'smaller capacity physical media', e.g. Switch carts, which get exponentially more expensive for larger cart capacities.
"The example given is that a game with native 4K textures might need a 60GB download, but a 1080 native version might only need 20GB (which would allow it to fit on a 32GB Switch Cart, the current max size Nintendo produces for Switch 1). The idea being to do a 4X upscale on the device in realtime.
"Also of note, all examples given in the patent talk about speeds and accuracy of either 540p to 1080p or 1080p to 4K upscales."
Nintendo will be unveiling the successor to the Nintendo Switch before the end of March and it will be backwards compatible with the original Switch.
Another new Nintendo patent published yesterday seems to yet again verify claims the Switch 2 will use DLSS style AI upscaling (Nvidia chip) to improve output resolution for games, rather than trying to natively run them at higher internal resolutions.
ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-pu...
— Laura Kate Dale - LauraKBuzz (@laurakbuzz.bsky.social) January 1, 2025 at 8:40 AM
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A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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If it could run 540 handheld upscaled to 1080 (or 900 or whatever the screen is going to be), and run 1080 docked upscaled to 4k that would be brilliant. That'd really save on file size and on performance.
I'm going to keep saying that it's how I think DLSS will primarily be used for it, and I'm perfectly fine with that. At least as far as file sizes go; More educated users like the first one to post in this article will remind us that DLSS requires quite a bit of processing power itself, so it doesn't guarantee automatic performance gains.
Still, if it makes another generation of owning games in a physical form feasible without scummy practices, I'm pleased.
But it still uses AI apparently, and AI these days is nothing but a scummy practice.
I'm sorry but I humbly disagree. AI, neural networks and machine learning have been around for ages in different shapes and forms. DLSS in particular was officially released in 2019, four years before GPT came around with all the controversies it brought and everyone started labelling everything AI and turned it into an annoying, meaningless at times, shady buzzword.
I can't really think of a way to think about his particular use case as bad or scummy. It's just a bunch of code that helps make a videogame look better.
Journalist Laura Kate Dale on Bluesky also doesn't understand that output resolution is not the same as texture resolution.
7th gen consoles like the Xbox 360 had a few games with 4k textures... Games like RAGE even had 128k resolution textures for their megatexturing technology.
They were still only 720P games though at most.
Textures are also extremely compressible, if Nintendo has a on-the-fly decompression unit like what we see on Xbox and Playstation, that would be a big boon... Otherwise developers can use some spare CPU time to manage that.
As for "upscaling" having the hardware capability is one thing, there is no guarantee a developer will use it, some developers will use their own bespoke technology if they feel it's more beneficial.
Either way, we already knew the console will have A.I. Upscaling support thanks to nVidia.
In other news, water is wet.
...She gets paid for this right?
Couldn't they just had HUMANS do the upscaling?
Nope. Just like Coke couldn't hire humans to make that horrid AI Christmas commercial with the warped trucks lol. This is where we're headed, like it or not.
Well I don't like it. It's bullshit.
That's putting is gently. haha
Humans can't upscale images in real-time, let AI do this it's fine
Many in the military & private sector will use it to maximize death, destruction, and suffering...but that doesn't mean AI can't be used for good. Using AI to upres an image, for instance, should not be much of an issue. It'd be like using AI to help write up an Excel chart or smth. Monotonous labor replaced with efficient automation.
p.s. Just as an FYI: Many many video games have been using AI for decades. How else do you think the CPU in MarioKart are designed?
You're a nice guy so don't take this badly, I just want to help guide you. The AI that we've been using since the pong days are not the same kind of AI we're working with today. Today's AI can learn and eventually do your job for you, any job you can imagine honestly. The AI of pong was just a basic reactive algorithm, it wasn't able to learn and bootstrap itself into a radiologist for example. That's the unfair kind. I understand why humanity is building these things, but I also understand why many humans disagree, lots of trained people will have to ignore years of studies to let AI do their work, that's a lot of people and a lot of tuition money. Not the same story as the Atari's AI.
My two cents 😉
To clarify: "Many in the...private sector will use [AI] to maximize...suffering" with "suffering" referring to ppl being left w/o a job b/c boss wanted to cut costs w/ the far more cost-effective AI labor.
I understand that unregulated AI has the potential to create big issues when it comes to human labor and such, but -- again -- that doesn't mean it's impossible for AI to be used for good. Menial and monotonous labor such as upresing an image is not smth I'd consider to be a "loss" for humans upon being outsourced to some AI algorithm, esp when the "fruits of this labor" would have not been "reaped" in the first place had the AI not been introduced. (In other words: You could either have the AI cherry to top your cake, or no cherry at all.) Nintendo would've just chosen a far less efficient route of running games at higher res had the AI not been used.
(p.s. That first sentence of yours is very kind. Gives me a whole lotta joy to hear this! :) ...assuming you were being srs, and not just sarcastic or smth lol.)
I still say AI is gonna fuck over the global economy big time and will no doubt lead to military AI trying to kill us all simply because it views as outdated.
military is already using AI...it has already lead to mass casualities in regions such as Gaza.
I knew people learned nothing from The Terminator. We're fucked. -_-
I was being sincere, I like your vibe.
well, i appreciate the kindness (as well clarification). :)
A professor of mine often insisted that the concept of "intelligence" is very hard to truly define. Sure, we can call pong's "AI" a reactive algorithm and that's by all technical means true. It's not much different than a cooking recipe to be honest.
More modern AI resources are more advanced, so nobody sane would call it just a reactive algorithm. But GPT for example ultimately is a complex and heavily trained neural network that receives words as an input and then minimizes some error function by generating words that correlate the highest as an output to the stated input. There are engineers in OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia that all of them together if they wanted could explain in great detail how AI nowadays work, what are the mathematical models behind it, etc. Thus, although very cumbersome, you could technically calculate its most likely answer by hand (since it uses statistical models for it). No such thing can be done with the human brain for example since its inner workings are still difficult for us to understand. So, in a way, is current AI truly intelligence? Even if highly difficult, you can dissect it step by step. Engineers know exactly what it does, and can replicate it over and over. There are no black boxes in this process unlike the intelligent human brain. Is it intelligence at all, or is it a very, VERY advanced and tailored cooking recipe algorithm?
My point would be, then, that albeit it feels (and is in some ways!) unfair, it's more or less the same that people worried about when machinery overtook hard labor jobs during the industrial revolution for example, or electronic machines replacing jobs that required high precision or delicate movements, or the internet changing the way information moves around the world. This time around it's doing the same but with soft skills instead of hard skills or precise mechanicals skills. Many people, myself included, are worried for their jobs and other implications. It's here to stay for better AND worse, so it's really no much use to do anything other than adapt to it for our own professional and personal well-being. It's just another way technology is reshaping our lives much like the internet and later social media did these last few decades.
It's tough, but that's okay. We're all in it together.
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