Years have passed and the Nintendo Switch Pro has not hit the market. Neither has the “Lite” version, another of those that have been sounding. And perhaps it has not been necessary because it must be recognized that the Switch has been another triumph for the big N and gamers have ended up valuing its innovative concept for playing games both on the desktop and on the move. If sales started lukewarm, over time Nintendo has overcome the Wii U fiasco, has been completing a good catalog of its own and third-party games, and has outsold the 3DS and 2DS, selling 80 million units.
Nintendo Switch Pro: NVIDIA wants it
The disastrous “launch” of the new generation of consoles from Sony and Microsoft has helped boost sales of the Switch. Of course, when PS5 and Xbox X/S are massively available the situation may change. Nintendo knows this and so does an NVIDIA that has a vested interest in a potential Nintendo Switch Pro.
The original NVIDIA Shield in 2014 showed that a portable console with great potential could be created. The green giant planned to expand its gaming machine to the living room and game streaming services. Surely the Shield did not go unnoticed at Nintendo HQ and was a spur for the final design of the Switch and the partnership with NVIDIA to create a custom Tegra series SoC as the main engine. If AMD powers Sony and Microsoft consoles, NVIDIA powers Nintendo. And it wants more.
This is where the latest rumor about the Nintendo Switch Pro comes in. It comes from NateDrake on the Resetera forums and suggests that NVIDIA already has the hardware design ready, a custom SoC with more power than the original, and support for DLSS and 4K.
You know that after ray tracing the big feature being pushed by the company is NVIDIA DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling), a technique that uses artificial intelligence and sophisticated algorithms for graphics chips to increase performance in frames per second when running games. It would be a novelty of enormous interest in a console like the Nintendo Switch Pro considering that its support is rapidly expanding to a large number of games.
Ditto 4K. This does not mean that the console will mount a 4K display, but that it would have enough performance to deliver ultra-high-definition content on an external display. For the display itself, there is talk of one of the novel mini-LEDs that Apple also wants to use. It is an improvement on current LEDs that as the name suggests greatly reduces (by up to 1,000 times) the size of the LEDs in a typical monitor or TV. They offer many of the advantages of OLED, but without the drawbacks such as the well-known ‘burnin’ of the panels. They offer high contrast ratios, a wide color gamut, improved black tones, and peak brightness of up to 1,500 nits.
There is no confirmation of the veracity of this information, but it is clear that NVIDIA is interested in extending its graphics technology and the new console would be ideal to do so. As for the gaming giant, it is not talking, but it is leaving hints such as that of Nintendo America president Doug Bowser: “we continue to explore and look for new ways to adapt technology to create new gaming experiences”.
