Actual news! I'm always curious as to what type of demos Nintendo actually show to devs pre-launch, so it's interesting to see what they've gone with.
Further reports about Switch 2 at Gamescom
In Cologne last month, Nintendo's public Gamescom showfloor booth let you play Pikmin 4 and Super Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. …
www.eurogamer.net
This part is quite interesting:
A recent
report pinned Switch 2's arrival for the latter part of next year, with development kits now in the hands of some key partners. This chimed with what Eurogamer had also previously heard, though on timing I understand Nintendo is keen to launch the system sooner if possible.
It seems like supply chain rumours were mostly pointing to H1, whereas most reports from the gaming press were claiming H2, so it's interesting to see Eurogamer state that H1 seems to be on the table.
The BoTW demo is also interesting. It's not hugely surprising that it's not ToTK, as my guess is they started work on the demo before ToTK finished, and probably wanted to be able to work on something without the code changing under them. I wouldn't be surprised if this was an early internal test of the new hardware that they were happy enough with to show third parties. They would be very unlikely to show third parties actual in-progress games for the new console to avoid leaks, anyway.
I'm
really curious about what the BoTW demo looks like, shame it'll almost certainly never see the light of day.
A UE5 demo makes sense, as Nintendo obviously want to demonstrate support for the biggest middleware, and the choice of the Matrix demo is a really interesting one. Given the demo was originally built as a "show off PS5 and XBSX" showcase, it really seems like a statement of intent that Nintendo wants to position the new console as something that can stand alongside Sony and MS's hardware. I wouldn't put a huge amount of faith in "visuals comparable to Sony's and Microsoft's current gen consoles", though, as they wouldn't have done a Digital Foundry-style side-by-side demo going into all the nitty gritty differences. The fast that it's not obviously much worse looking than those consoles is still a very good thing, at least, but I'm not expecting them to hold up side-by-side.
Incidentally, I know they removed the reference to DLSS 3.5, but I actually would be a little surprised if they
weren't using DLSS 3.5 (ie Ray Reconstruction, not frame generation, the naming is stupid). We know they were demoed DLSS 2 long before it was made public, and had access to newer versions of DLSS before being made public, and Nvidia gave CD Projekt Red enough time with DLSS 3.5 before the announcement to get it integrated into Cyberpunk 2077 for a demo. There's no reason they wouldn't have also given Nintendo early access to it, and it makes a huge difference to image quality in games with ray tracing, or equivalently a huge difference to performance, as a lower sample count can be used to achieve good IQ. If Nintendo want to show off their new hardware in the best light (which they obviously do), then using DLSS 3.5 is a no-brainer.
Common consent was that, due to DLSS 3 having some requirements that need the current gen of nVidia GPUs, it would be unlikely to have/use DLSS 3, but use the 2 versions.
Nvidia's DLSS naming/numbering is stupid, but the short of it is that DLSS Frame Generation (which was added to DLSS in version 3.0) won't run on Switch 2, but DLSS 3.x also includes updates to the temporal upscaling part of DLSS (what people refer to as DLSS 2), which should all run on the new hardware. In particular, DLSS 3.5 adds a new version of the temporal upscaling specifically designed to work with ray tracing (DLSS Ray Reconstruction), which should work on Switch 2, and make a significant difference to performance/image quality of games with ray tracing.