Pretty sure that "from 540p onwards it looks good", is not true in general.

What matters is where you start, where you want to go to and what assets you have available.

You cant just magically make a game go from 540p to 4k, using 6th gen texture quality assets, and have it look like a native 4k game with 4k assets

Thank you.  

No one is saying go from 540p to 4K.

I said 540p to 1080p looks great, it looks very close to real 1080p on a 8 inch screen that's absolutely going to pass, shit it's even passable on my 77 inch OLED, I had 10 friends over and none of them had any clue they were playing a game from a low ass resolution of 540p, they thought it was 1080p on giant ass TV. 

FOR TV MODE (will capitalize, since apparently some people have reading comprehension issues), 720p to 1440p in DLSS mode looks terrific. It looks very close to real 1440p, that will be more than good enough for 99% of the people Nintendo is trying to sell to. 900p looks even better, 1080p to 4K looks great too.

For actual fucking Nintendo fans, you should be very pleased if the Switch 2 has DLSS technology. It is the real fucking deal, way better than that jaggy shit called FSR 2.0/3.0, you're going to be getting fantastic image quality at a fraction of the pixel budget, so much so that there's no point I believe in rendering natively on the Switch 2 at all. You are in for a treat. 

There's no use case that I could see where it's really worth rendering 4-8x more pixels you need for native rather than just using DLSS. If you're a Switch 2 developer, stick with 540-600p to 1080p undocked DLSS, 720p-900p to 1440p or 4K docked ... you're going to get very close to native 1080p undocked, 1440p or better docked at a fraction of the pixel budget. If you still have performance overhead just switch to DLSS Balanced and get even better image quality. But DLSS is good ... it's like shockingly good. What it can do with even just 540p pixels is ridiculous. AI assisted graphics, and eventually probably even just graphics entirely generated by AI algorithms themselves is going to be the future for sure. 

To me it seems like we are talking past each other to a certain extend in this thread and it's a bit confusing. So I'll ask the more knowledgeable people in this thread the question that is the most interesting to me: If we assume the visual results the Switch 2 can produce will be similar to a PS4 or PS4 Pro (thanks to bells and whistles like DLSS and more modern architecture - I'm not talking about raw power but the visual end result, if you will). Would Switch 2 in that case be able to handle a significant proportion of new third party games released on Xbox Series and PS5 with acceptable visual sacrifices? And would it be able to handle a bigger proportion of third party games than Switch 1 during its run? 

My (amateurish) guess to these questions would be "yes": Xbox Series S exists and as long as a game runs, say, at 1440p on Series S, it should run at 1080p (upscaled via DLSS from a lower resolution and at moderately lower settings) on Switch 2. Personally that would be fine for me, I'm not an expert, though. I don't expect a port of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, but if most games can run well on Switch 2, that would be fine in my opinion. Wouldn't the gap between Series S and Switch 2 be a lot closer than the gap between PS4 and Switch 1 in that case? 

Really depends on effort from third party developers.  Most steam games can run on a 1070 and scale up with something a 4080.

Visuals sacrifices is a personal opinion.  Memory bandwidth of 100 gb/s a second it a bottleneck.  Switch 2 won't have high fps, detailed settings for shadows, reflections, lighting and volumetric, etc.  It won't be running 2 gb textures at 16x anisotropic filtering.  Point being resolution is only one piece of a larger puzzle.  

Does any of the above matter?  Personal preference.  But if your question is can the switch 2 run modern games, sure it can.  The sacrifices will be visual, it won't break the game.  

On my PC I can run RE4 at ultra settings, high fps and 4k.  I can play it at low settings, 30 fps capped at low settings. It plays fine but looks considerably worse.  Personal preference.

It almost never makes sense to run a game at native resolution these days. DLSS Quality/FSR Ultra Quality (sometimes even FSR Quality) often give better image quality and frame rates than native in their current forms.

So if the target is 1080p and the native resolution is 720p, often you get a better than native 1080p image quality.

For handheld mode this image quality isn't just "okay", I think it is pretty great. I play games on my Rog Ally at this resolution often and the image is very clean.  

Combine it with a VRR screen (hopefully Nintendo goes this route) that let's you play at least at 40hz, and you have an excellent gaming handheld. High-end for 2023, and probably mid-range for 2024 when the Switch 2 likely releases, given that next-gen APU's are releasing soon. 

For larger displays, a 1440p target from say 840p/900p (for Nintendo games), isn't too bad at console-gaming distances. For PC gaming, sure you probably want at least an internal 1080p -> 1440p, but if somebody is playing on a 50 inch TV (probably the average size), sitting a few meters away, the image shouldn't be too bad. 

This will be a substantial upgrade from the original Switch. Because of the Series S and other gaming handhelds existing, obviously 3rd party support is going to be more viable than with Switch and Wii with respect to their competitors. 

I think this is something most people in this thread can agree on, independently of the semantic argument over "comparable." 

FSR is shit compared to DLSS too, DLSS provides a very clean looking image that most people are not going to be able to tell a big difference from actual native res and then add in on top of that you're getting basically free anti-aliasing, something current Switch games suffer from a lack of and it's just laughable to me that as a Switch 2 dev you'd want to brute force 4-8x the pixel count for no real big gain in visual fidelity. 540p to 1080p even is very, very acceptable and that's coming from me, I'm an image quality enthusiast. 

I was so disgusted visiting my friend at a Best Buy that he worked at at their TV/OLED section that I made him get me the remotes for all their flagship big screen TVs and recalibrated the settings for each one manually. His manager even offered me a job, but I'm not working minimum wage at retail no way, lol. 

If 540p to 1080p DLSS can pass on a big screen display as acceptable, "Joe Fucking Average" gamer is going to be more than fine with that on a 8 inch screen, it's not even worth arguing. For a TV mode, once you give DLSS 720p pixels even, it can produce good visuals on very large displays. 

Keep in mind we are talking about a general public who don't even know what a damn real 4K image looks like most of the time. Most people don't understand that Netflix "4K" streams are dog shit bit rate, lower than even 1080p physical Blu-Ray and many PS5/XSX games aren't doing 4K native either.  Most people don't know native 4K from their ass.

Nintendo is going to be more than fine with DLSS from much lower resolutions, 99% of people are never going to know any better and think they are just playing native resolution. 

I wouldn't necessarily call "FSR.. shit compared to DLSS." It is about a half-step below DLSS, in their current iterations. Ultra Quality FSR ~ Quality DLSS, Quality FSR ~ Balanced DLSS, etc. The advantage for the Switch 2 is that it can use either upscaling solution, so even if AMD did catch up and exceed Nvidia in certain instances, the Switch 2 can easily just use FSR too. So for those titles where DLSS is superior Switch 2 can use that, and for those where FSR is superior (assuming AMD catches up) then it can use that. 

I personally can tell a significant difference between 540p -> 1080p and 720p -> 1080p, even on a handheld display. It looks better than native 720p but doesn't quite achieve native 1080p's image quality, whereas 720p -> 1080p exceeds native more often than not. I don't think Nintendo or third parties will need to go that low in terms of native resolution in all but the most demanding titles. The Switch 2 has enough memory bandwidth to consistently produce native 720p that can be upscaled to 1080p. I expect most games will do this. And you likely won't get much of a performance benefit from going down to 540p anyway. It would be a last-ditch solution to get a game to run acceptably in the most demanding titles, is my guess. The average Joe probably would indeed be fine, but if there is little cost to run the title at native 720p then it isn't really an issue. 

What is more critical than even DLSS, imo, is that the display supports VRR. Variable 40-60 HZ has become a standard on gaming handhelds. The difference in how a game "feels" between 30fps and 45 fps (- 11 ms), is much more significant than between 45 fps and 60fps (- 5.5 ms.)  as long as you don't have screen-tearing because your display doesn't support VRR. That would be the real game-changer when it comes to parity. Games that are running at a solid 45 fps or variable 45-60 hz won't feel too different from a solid 60fps as far as responsiveness. 

I honestly think the "diminishing returns" thingy about graphical fidelity is true.
Its a curve, not a straigt line..... which means on the lower end, your "paying" less
for the image quality rendered vs at the topend (in terms of how graphically demanding it is to render).

Minor improvements, takeing on drastically more resources... and stuff like raytraceing (which while pretty, is insanely demanding).

Yes a Switch 2, should be able to play 3rd party titles, probably better than the first Switch did, and with less noticeable drawbacks compairably.

It also helps your launching "mid" gen, after Playstation and Xbox, to compete with their hardware.

I think a bigger issue, might be the Ram pool, and how large the cartridges for the Switch are.
Alot of games nowadays are 100+ GB, now alot of that is high quality textures.... which you can downgrade, for a Switch 2, if it doesnt have the GPU grunt to make use of it anyways (like the Switch)... however theres just no way 32 GB sized cartridges is going to be enough.

Hopefully Nintendo has ones upto 64-128gb for the Switch 2.
Either that, or we return to the PS1 days.....

"please insert disk 1, to continue"  (cartridge 1)

I think people really need to understand resolution is just one piece of visuals. Many other factors include fps, texture quality, anisotropic filtering, lighting, shadows, reflections, SSAA, etc. All of which eat memory bandwidth.

Point being 1080p 120 fps ultra settings versus 1440p 30 fps low settings.... not a contest. The former wins by a landslide.

Resolution is being given too much emphasis.