Nvidia-Powered Nintendo Switch Could Leverage AMD FSR Tech

Nintendo Switch Sports
(Image credit: Nintendo)

It's rumored that an upcoming game for the Nintendo Switch will support AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution technology to enhance image quality while preserving playable performance. Given the open-source nature of AMD's upscaling algorithm, Nintendo Switch Sports could be among the first but certainly not the last to support AMD's FSR. 

The end-user license agreement (EULA) for Nintendo's upcoming Switch Sports game reportedly indicates that the title uses AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution, as discovered by @NWPlayer123 (via VideoCardz). Since Switch Sports is a first-party Nintendo title, it's speculated that the Japanese company added support for FSR to its proprietary agl C++ rendering library, which pretty much guarantees adoption of the technology by other Nintendo games. 

Nintendo Switch Sports

(Image credit: Nintendo)

The Switch game console comes with a display featuring a 1280x720 resolution and can output images to an external display with a 1920x1080 resolution. AMD's FSR can be used to enhance image quality at 720p or maintain high framerates at 1080p. However, it is hard to tell how the Switch Sports title will use the technology. 

The Nintendo Switch is based on Nvidia's Tegra X1 system-on-chip with four Arm Cortex-A57 general-purpose cores and an Nvidia Maxwell GPU with 256 CUDA cores. This SoC was released in mid-2015, and while its performance was good upon release, it is challenging to make games look better on the platform today. By adopting AMD's FSR, which works on all modern GPUs, Nintendo can improve the image quality of its games without substantial investments. 

In addition to the [rumored arrival on the] Nintendo Switch, Valve's Steam Deck also recently gained support for AMD's FSR.

(Image credit: @NWPlayer123)
Anton Shilov
Freelance News Writer

Anton Shilov is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

  • JarredWaltonGPU
    This is a test.

    But, I also want to say that I'm curious as to how FSR looks on a 720p display. It's a small display so you might not see the difference, but also upscaling from even lower resolutions seems like there would be a severe lack of data.
    Reply