Nintendo Switch 2 filing reveals AI upscaling: 720p to 4K, 1080p to 1440p

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has yet again revealed some unannounced details about the Nintendo Switch 2. This time, the inclusion of what appears to be upscaling technology.

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It was only recently that filing with the FCC revealed the Nintendo Switch 2 will have two USB-C ports and the support for Wi-Fi 6. Now, another filing has been discovered and has seemingly revealed the inclusion of AI upscaling technology, with the above image showcasing a process of taking a low-resolution image through a render pipeline that increases the output resolution of the image seen on screen. It should be noted that this technology may not be used for Nintendo's newly released games but instead, it's old games from previous console generations, as the image depicts a 540p image being bumped up to 1080p.

There are very few new games on the original Switch that launch with a 540p resolution, and most are extremely graphically intensive and only briefly drop down to this resolution when in handheld mode. Regardless of where the technology is used, it appears the Switch 2 will feature some kind of AI upscaling technology, which, if true, isn't totally surprising since NVIDIA is slated to power the upcoming console with an SoC from the Ampere generation of GPUs, specifically the NVIDIA Tegra T239 SoC. This SoC is capable of AI upscaling.

Digging more into the filing, there is language that states the AI upscaler will also be able to take a 720p image and convert it to a 4K image. It should be noted these filings date back to 2020 and were published in 2021, meaning quite a lot may have changed between now and when this technology was created.

"For example, a neural network for upconverting to 1080p from 540p will be different than one upconverting from 1080p to 1440p (e.g., 2560×1440). It will also be appreciated that while the example shown in FIGS. 3-7 relates to transforming a 540p image to a 1080p image, the techniques herein may be applied to other image sizes (e.g., 720p to 1080p; 480p to 1080p, 1080p to 1440p, 1080p to 4k/3840×2160, 720p to 4K, etc.)," states the filing