After a torrent of Nintendo Switch 2 leaks to close out last year, 2025 kicked off with even more potential details about the upcoming console. On January 1, gaming industry consultant Laura Kate Dale spotted a patent from Nintendo published on New Year’s Eve. The patent appears to describe how Nintendo plans to use AI upscaling to improve the output resolution of its games, which might be a hint at how the Switch 2 will reach 4K resolution.
Previous rumors have suggested Nintendo will use technology similar to Nvidia’s deep learning super sampling (DLSS) to upscale Switch 2 games rather than trying to run them at 4K natively. This patent, filed on July 13, 2023, seems to corroborate those rumors.
As Dale notes, one use case Nintendo mentions in the patent is reducing the file size of games to fit them on “smaller capacity physical media,” which could refer to the Switch game cards. For instance, a game with 4K textures might require a 60GB download, while a 1080p version would only take up 20GB. The console would then upscale the textures in real-time.
Dale also points out that all of the examples Nintendo provides “talk about speeds and accuracy of either 540p to 1080p or 1080p to 4K upscale.”
Nintendo will very likely never compete with the raw power of the latest PlayStation or Xbox, but these are the innovations that will be necessary to provide a true next-generation experience on the Switch 2, no matter how much more powerful it is than its predecessor.
“While I can’t speak for third party titles, I will say that of all the console makers I think might benefit from Upscaling, Nintendo’s probably best positioned to benefit from the tech,” Dale said in a thread about the Nintendo patent on Bluesky. “The art direction of most of their titles is the kind of thing that should play fairly nicely with DLSS.”
