Will the Switch 2 have some secret sauce? If so, what?

[Pemalite]

Slownenberg said:

The opposite of this.

Ray tracing is just a cool special effect. Definitely not necessary. Pretty sure third party games can just turn that off for porting. It's not something essential to gameplay, just an effect.

It is far from just a "cool special effect" it actually has gameplay ramifications when implemented correctly as you can have a very accurate (For a video game) simulation of lighting, shadowing and reflections, so a stealth title like Thief? Would be far more immersive.

Slownenberg said:

DLSS on the other hand would allow games from consoles to actually run on Nintendo's handheld, because developers could dial the resolution way down while porting and then just use DLSS to raise the resolution back up near what it is on the consoles but without nearly as much power draw.

DLSS doesn't mean crap. DLSS is using A.I generative technologies in order to upscale an image.

It -does- require dedicated silicon, silicon that could be used for a faster CPU, GPU or more Ram for better native images and easier porting.

It -does- introduce rendering artifacts into a scene, like texture/shader shimmer.

And the other thing is, DLSS itself is not a requirement because frame-reconstruction is actually an industry-wide thing now, we have AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution that is open source and can run on -all- hardware and not just propriety nVidia hardware.

That means if Nintendo ever does decide to change it's chipset in Switch 3 to another manufacturer, they can retain backwards compatibility as they are not tied behind propriety, copyrighted technology from a 3rd party like nVidia.

Thirdly, DLSS requires more memory, Nintendo is pretty stingy with Ram, so we need every byte we can get.

Slownenberg said:

DLSS is much much more important than ray tracing and is the only one of those two features that are important for ports. Not saying next gen Nintendo won't have ray tracing, but it would just be a nice extra, while DLSS can give next gen Nintendo not only much better graphics but also a lot more ports from consoles.

DLSS has alternatives. It doesn't guarantee ports... Especially if your hardware feature set is behind the competition.
DLSS also consumes hardware resources like RAM.
There are alternatives to DLSS like FSR, XeSS, Temporal upscaling with frame interpolation, spatial upscaling, checkerboard.
Many of which can be implemented on the engine side.

Ray Tracing is hardware generation defining.

We are in the era of Ray Tracing whether we like it or not.

Last edited by Pemalite - on 05 August 2023