One of the most ambitious titles lined up for the launch of the Nintendo Switch 2, CD Projekt RED’s Cyberpunk 2077 has been showcased via work-in-progress code seen at the console’s launch tour. Digital Foundry had the chance to go hands-on at the recent London event and while our initial impressions are on the record, many questions remained unanswered. Is the port using Nvidia DLSS? CDPR has now confirmed that the answer is yes, making this the first known title to use the machine learning-based upscaling technology.
“We’re using a version of DLSS available for Nintendo Switch 2 hardware, powered by Nvidia’s Tensor cores,” the firm told us. “The game utilises DLSS in all four modes: in handheld and docked, and the performance and quality variations of each.”
DLSS has been viewed as a ‘magic bullet’ of sorts in the run-up to the Switch 2’s unveiling. In a world where developers are pushing visual technology to the next level, running games at full native res with consistent performance becomes unviable, so rendering at lower rendering resolutions is commonplace, with upscalers used to produce the final output image. These upscalers can range from basic bilinear scaling to more advanced techniques, like TAA upscaling – where information from prior frames is fed into the current one to improve detail.
DLSS is a form of TAA upscaling, but with a twist – by feeding the lower resolution frame along with history from prior frames and other data, such as motion vectors – a neural network is then used to reconstruct the image. As the Switch 2’s GPU includes machine learning tensor cores, there’s no reason why any DLSS technology couldn’t come to the Nintendo hybrid – the caveat being that there’s still a computational cost to using it.
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CD Projekt RED also confirmed that the current target for the Switch 2 version of the game is to offer different graphics modes – a quality and performance toggle for the handheld and docked versions. When connected to a TV, there’s the choice of a 30fps quality mode and a 40fps performance mode. The latter would presumably operate only with the TV in 120Hz mode – a new frame for every three display refreshes, up against the 30fps quality mode which delivers a new frame for every other refresh. With consistent performance, both should look smooth, with the 40fps mode sitting between 30fps and 60fps in terms of fluidity. Both modes are using 1080p as the output resolution with dynamic resolution scaling in effect in combination with DLSS.