In some potentially game-changing news for the Switch, Nintendo Switch Sports looks as if it is using chip-manufacturing giant AMD’s FidelityFX and FidelityFX Super-Resolution (FSR) technology. This could signal the beginning of a new dawn for increased frame rates and potentially upgraded visuals in Switch games.
Revealed by NWPlayer123 on Twitter, the licensing agreements within Nintendo Switch Sports lists both AMD’s FidelityFX and FidelityFX Super-Resolution open-source algorithm as being in the game in some way. FSR is AMD’s answer to Nvidia’s DLSS and is used to increase frame rates and upscale from lower resolutions with little impact on hardware capabilities. This could, as an example, mean that Switch games can be developed at native 900p or lower and upscaled to 1080p, maintaining the higher quality textures and increased frame rates the lower native resolution allows without taking a noticeable hit to overall visual quality and image sharpness.
Despite the Switch using an Nvidia Tegra X1 graphics card, the console is able to take advantage of AMD’s performance-boosting FSR algorithm on a game-by-game basis due to its open-source nature. Moving forward, we could potentially be seeing Switch games with better graphics and performance thanks to the wizardry of FSR.
Nintendo Switch Sports looks to be testing the waters of the technology on the Switch. It’s a super cheap way for Nintendo to maximize the visuals it can get out of the now-dated Switch hardware without necessarily needing to invest in a whole new Nintendo Switch Pro.
