Mario games since N64 have often used advance lighting effects. Sometimes incorporate it into level design gimmicks. I can see Nintendo using some RT for a level in the next Mario game.

Even this DK render is well below the Switch 2 capabilities. It's just a case of the team actually building an asset from the ground up for Switch 2 and utilising the right tech/rendering techniques. If Nintendo is not implementing DLSS2 at the moment to free up resources, I don't think there's much use in speculating their use of DLSS5 lol

DK Bananza was a Switch 1 game that was moved to Switch 2 (probably late into dev) so that explains a lot on that. 

Nintendo even showed the Switch 1 version here:

I think they will definitely use DLSS5/6/7 whatever by the time Switch 3 is out, people doubted the Switch 2 would use DLSS too in the early days and how'd that go. 

The fact that you can just offload most of the lighting compute to Tensor cores/NPU cores alone will be a huge benefit to a Switch 3. No point in bothering with path tracing/ray tracing really if you just just have that done on Tensor cores and not bog down the GPU with that. The lighting side of it will likely get better with future iterations too, this is just the first attempt. Right now it looks like the DLSS5 algo is trained to basically add perfect Hollywood style lighting to each scene (so a key light, fill light, back light, and I even notice an eye light too) and for some people that's jarring, they can likely adjust this for future revisions, though I think some people do like this look even as is. 

How they feel about actual generative AI over art assets themselves ... that could be a different story, I think they'll be initially cautious about using that but eventually probably will cave on that too. It really depends on what the broader industry does. They have a few years now to just kinda sit back and see how this whole thing shakes out, Switch 3 you're probably talking about a chip decision on that still be 3-4 years out from today (2030), by then Nvidia will be well past the 50 or even 60 series and you'll probably have DLSS7 or something that is a lot better than DLSS5. 

"Need" is a really odd word to use for game development. 

Technically video games aren't a "need" at all. They're luxury goods. Developers don't "need" to improve visuals or performance at all. Games could have probably stayed at the 7th Generation level in terms of genre diversity and gameplay mechanisms. 

Having said that, ray tracing definitely can benefit "cartoony" games. There are many beautiful CGI animations that are beautiful because they use ray-tracing, as an example. Accelerating it with an algorithm (that's all "AI", in this context, is) isn't that big of a deal really. 

My point though is that DLSS 5 is not the full extent of neural rendering. Neural rendering is much more than that, and Nintendo is almost certainly going to use it in its development. DLSS 5 might arguably "draw over" assets, but Nvidia (and AMDs, UE5's, Intel's, etc) suite of features don't all do that. Some help accelerate rendering so that more high-quality assets can run on hardware that they couldn't have. 

If ones opposition to "AI" is quality of the output, then that is almost certainly going to improve over time, and probably will be in a good place by SW3's release a decade-ish out from now. 

DLSS 5 is indeed a post-process effect, but all of these other features are directly part of the render pipeline and aren't post-process effects. In the case of neural materials, as an example, small MLPs tweak the material properties of specific materials to maintain a high quality without performance penalties. This happens far before the image is finally processed and output to the screen. 

https://research.nvidia.com/labs/rtr/neural_appearance_models/

The input is the actual sampled mesh and shading data and the output are material properties. 

A big part of populism in the coming years will be a push to regulate AI and make sure the systems aren't mainly in the hands of billionaires and AI companies. In general though we can probably just leave this here for now since I feel we've kinda said everything we have to say on the subject for now. I'm optimistic about it long term but we can agree on the part that there's likely gonna be a rough stretch. More than anything my original point here was showing that there's more than just a few positive applications of AI since the technology is already powerful enough to be very broad in its applications.

I still don't want more AI because of the water wasted to cool the data centres. Not to mention the chemical added to said water can't be removed, and because of the emissions from the data centres said chemical is going into the atmosphere and rain, hurting animals and humans alike.

How do you avoid those problems?

Nvidia did mention I think that DLSS5 can be applied to games like Minecraft even and have notable visual uplift, so yeah it would certainly help Nintendo even with "cartoony games". 

Even if they only use it in lieu of using real time path tracing, the performance benefit from that alone could be massive. Giving developers a third option between spending tons of time/effort with baked lighting or having to go down the ray traced lighting/path tracing/Lumen avenue that takes up a ton of hardware resources will be a game changer for what the Switch 3 can do because you're taking probably the most GPU intensive task (real time lighting) and moving it off to an AI algorithm using the Tensor cores instead at likely a much lower compute cost. You just need to make sure you have enough CUDA cores to make DLSS5 work. 

By the time the Switch 3 chip is even chosen you're probably talking about DLSS7 or 8 or something too, something that will be well beyond DLSS5. 

Some of these things are real concerns. They're not inherently AI driven though. 

You don't need water cooling for AI. You can run an AI on a modest gaming computer. 

But corporations are trying to run mega models that are 100x bigger and require very ridiculously specialized hardware. 

DLSS 5 isn't harmful in really any of the ways, you're talking about. It's harmful in other ways. 

Well so far DLSS 5 hasn't killed anybody at least. We've already had Iranian civilians killed because some brainless AI program marked them as military targets.

Making those mega models will be a mistake, one way or another. Say goodbye to being able to afford a house.