Alex Battaglia of Digital Foundry has revealed that the Nintendo Switch 2 employs two distinct implementations of NVIDIA’s DLSS. His analysis indicates the system uses a conventional DLSS model comparable to the PC version alongside a second, much lighter-weight variant designed to reduce performance overhead.
This dual approach helps explain how demanding titles can run at higher apparent resolutions on the new console.
The distinction was most obvious when testing Hogwarts Legacy, The Touryst and Fast Fusion. Battaglia observed that the economical DLSS build delivers crisper still frames, yet during motion it often appears as if upscaling isn’t engaging. A developer familiar with the tech corroborated this, saying: “DLSS on Switch 2 comes in two flavours. One is akin to the CNN presets on PC; the other costs roughly half the frame-time.”
The budget model halves rendering expenditure, allowing the GPU to reallocate cycles to other tasks. Estimates from 2023 suggested that full DLSS at 4K would consume about 18 ms of GPU time on the Switch 2. The cheaper variant cuts that to roughly 9 ms, leaving around 7–8 ms for the remaining game processing. However, this often necessitates lowering the native render target — for example, to 648p in Fast Fusion and 720p in The Touryst — to preserve framerate stability.
The strategy highlights both the strengths and the compromises inherent in Nintendo’s hybrid design. On one hand, DLSS can enable near-4K output when docked. On the other, the lightweight mode produces uneven results in motion, a shortcoming critics point to for docked play. Battaglia suggested some titles might benefit more from a lower native resolution combined with conventional anti-aliasing, similar to approaches used in Cyberpunk 2077 or Street Fighter 6.
At launch, many Switch 2 releases rely on modified versions of DLSS to balance resolution and frame-rate, demonstrating both the promise and the difficulties of adapting PC-focused upscaling technologies to a portable console.
Source: iXBT.games