Donkey Kong Bananza on the Switch 2 uses AMD FSR 1, not NVIDIA DLSS

Donkey Kong Bananza is the latest 3D platformer from the team behind the critically acclaimed Super Mario Odyssey. With reviews now appearing online, it is another hit from Nintendo. With the game sitting on a score of 91 over on Metacritic, reviewers are praising the game's refreshing take on the genre, its presentation, and destructible sandbox environments.

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As far as technology goes, the Nintendo Switch 2 console-exclusive makes good use of the advanced NVIDIA hardware to deliver detailed environments, physics-based destruction, and animation. However, as part of Digital Foundry's comprehensive review of the game, which covers its performance and technical achievements, we discover a somewhat surprising fact.

According to Digital Foundry, the game utilizes AMD FSR 1, and not DLSS, for its dynamic 1080p to 1200p resolution when docked (or 1080p presentation when in handheld mode), which is then paired with an older post-processing anti-aliasing technique to smooth out edges.

This old-school approach is surprising because the Nintendo Switch 2 includes NVIDIA's Tensor Core technology to power DLSS, which is widely considered to be the gold standard for Super Resolution tech.

FSR 1, a spatial upscaling solution that doesn't account for motion or temporal data, introduces more artifacts and yields a significantly less detailed image than even FSR 2, let alone DLSS. In Donkey Kong Bananza, this means that fine detail is jaggy or lost entirely in the Super Resolution pass, so the overall presentation suffers.

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Granted, Digital Foundry still praises the game's visuals, which do look fantastic running on Switch 2 hardware. However, we wonder how much better or crisper the game would look if the team at Nintendo opted to include support for DLSS. This isn't the only criticism leveled at the game's performance, as Digital Foundry also discovered that when playing the game in docked mode, the game's V-Sync drops the frame-rate to 30 FPS in some of the more demanding sections of the game. As anyone who has switched from 30 FPS to 60 FPS on a console will note, the difference between the two frame rates is immediately noticeable.

Now, neither of these issues is a deal breaker, as Digital Foundry, like other reviewers, found Donkey Kong Bananza to be a fantastic 3D platformer that pushes the genre and Nintendo's impeccable game design to new heights.