Nintendo’s upscaling patent discovered as more Switch 2 component images appear to leak

On By Littum

New year, new Switch 2 delicious. While Nintendo’s plans for its Switch successor remain officially under wraps, a patent from the company has emerged detailing plans to use upscaling technology to cram games with up to 4K textures onto physical game cartridges.

The patent describes technology similar to Nvidia’s DLSS, or PlayStation 5 Pro’s baked in PSSR, to upscale images using AI. A key benefit noted here is reducing the size of games that would otherwise include large 4K native assets. This helps keep download sizes small and also allows these games to fit on moderately sized physical media.

Nintendo’s patent dates from July 2023, but was only made public this week. Seam highlighted by industry consultant Laura Kate Dale suggests the patent “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 maximum size )”.

The news comes as a fresh leak shows our best look yet at what appears to be the Switch 2’s internals. The images match what we know about the size and internal makeup of the device already from previous leaks – including an earlier glimpse of the Switch 2’s motherboard and the suggestion that the console will have a second USB port at the top of the device.

Change 2 motherboards
byu/MHN1994 inNintendoSwitch2

Nintendo has previously said it will announce the Switch 2 before the end of its current fiscal year, on March 31. But much of the console’s design can now be assumed – all signs point to it being a slightly larger version of the current Switch, with magnetic Joy-Con and a mysterious new “C” button on the right Joy-Con.

“Nintendo won’t have much time in January, so a potential announcement early in the month could make sense,” industry analyst Serkan Toto told Eurogamer last month. “You can bet that Nintendo is aware of all the leaks and is not happy about them, even if some of them will turn out to be made up. In fact, the leaks are getting so bad that they might make Nintendo release information earlier than planned.”