Switch Pro, Switch 2, Super Switch, Switch Model S: it's not entirely clear what it's actually going to called or when it's coming, but the rumours are non-stop and a continual topic is the use of Nvidia's DLSS – deep-learning super-sampling – the means of combining 'traditional' temporal super-sampling with a neural network to radically boost resolution. It's been used to great effect on PC and its job on a new Switch would be to take the 720p image designed for the mobile screen, then to scale it up to 2160p for an agreeable presentation on today's 4K displays. That's the theory, but in practise, is DLSS actually viable for a handheld device? We decided to run the numbers.
First of all, we need to look at the plausibility of an actual DLSS-capable processor ending up in a mobile console. There at least, there are positive answers. Nvidia's latest Tegra SoC (system on chip) is codenamed Orin, it's based on the latest Ampere architecture and it's primarily designed for the automotive industry which presents our first problem – it has a 45W power budget, in a world where the debut Switch hit a maximum of 15W, with 10-11W likely used by the main processor itself (and probably half of that in mobile mode). There is a solution though: there's an ultra low power rendition of Orin running at just 5W by default, but should easily scale up with more power consumption and more performance when docked.
Even so, despite integrating the tensor cores required to make DLSS a reality, we're still looking at a tiny power budget – and AI upscaling is not 'free', so the new step in our experiments is to measure the computational load of DLSS. You'll see in the video how we did this but the method of calculation is pretty straightforward. Using Doom Eternal as a base, we used an RTX 2060 to measure the time taken to process DLSS vs native resolution rendering and came to the conclusion that the render time cost of the process is 1.9ms. The RTX 2060 has around 5.5x the machine learning capability of the Orin chip operating at 10W, so assuming linear scaling, the PC iteration of DLSS would require a substantial 10.5ms of processing time on a prospective Switch Pro. In a world where Doom Eternal targets 16.7ms per frame, that's simply too high. However, for a 30fps game with a 33.3ms render budget, it's very, very viable.
