A US legal patent, filed by Nintendo in July 2023 and made public on December 31 2024, has revealed an interesting new feature that may be used in the Switch 2. The console, which has yet to be officially revealed while remaining a major mystery within the video game industry, could be able to play games at both a higher visual quality and with better performance if the patented tech is implemented.
The patent is for “systems and methods for machine learned image conversions”, which you may recognise as sounding similar in function to Nvidia’s DLSS tech, and the likes of PlayStation’s PSSR upscaling tech. This machine learning method allows hardware, in layman’s terms, to fill the gaps in video game graphics. It can generate the visuals you see at higher resolutions, without necessarily needing the hardware such visuals would usually demand.
This increase in visual quality also comes without the sacrifices in performance you’d usually expect. So, all in all, it’s a handy bit of tech. Especially for the Switch 2 – which is widely believed to not be as powerful as modern competitor consoles from Microsoft and PlayStation – and could benefit greatly from being able to squeeze more out of the processing power it does have.
The patent itself, which you can read here, is quite technical in its descriptions and illustrative diagrams. However, if you take the time to go through it, there are interesting tidbits sprinkled throughout. As accessibility consultant Laura Kate Dale points out on Bluesky, the patent states this tech could reduce the size of games, to better fit on “smaller capacity physical media”. Laura correctly makes the connection to Switch carts, which currently have a max capacity of 32GB. machine learning image conversions may allow for “bigger” games to fit natively on smaller capacity physical hardware.
This is not the first handy feature we know Nintendo is working with either, as it has previously confirmed that backwards compatability is coming to the console, which makes sense given the Switch’s vast library of exclusive titles.
All that’s really left to do is an official reveal of the Switch 2 at some point. What else are you hoping the Switch 2 comes packed with? Any dream features? Let us know!
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