Nintendo Reportedly Showed Off The Switch 2 At Gamescom

Oliver Brandt
·2 min read

Super Mario Bros. Wonder red OLED

The Nintendo Switch is in its seventh year on the market now, having released all the way back in 2017. That’s a pretty long lifetime for a console, and most video game consoles usually only last about six or seven years. Many have been wondering what’s next for Nintendo, and if reports are to be believed, some developers may have gotten a glimpse at that recently.

Eurogamer is reporting that Nintendo turned up to Gamescom last month with a functional “Switch 2”, or at least a development kit of some kind approximating the publishing giant’s next console. Nintendo apparently showed a select group of developers tech demos on the console, illustrating the capabilities and tech specs to those who may be creating games for it in the future.

According to Eurogamer’s reporting, one of these demos showed a “souped up” version of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The outlet doesn’t specify how, exactly, it was souped up, but if we had to guess we’d say it was probably running at a higher resolution, higher frame rate, or maybe even both.

VGC also claims to have sources corroborating these secret tech demo briefings, going further in saying that Epic’s The Matrix Awakens Unreal Engine 5 tech demo was shown running on the console. It also claims that the demo was using Nvidia’s AI upscaling technology, DLSS, and featured ray tracing and visuals “comparable to Sony’s and Microsoft’s current-gen consoles”.

DLSS isn’t particularly surprising, given Nintendo and Nvidia worked together on the first Switch’s internals. The latest version of DLSS, version 3.5, is supported on all RTX cards and cores, not just the latest and greatest, so it wouldn’t be a bad fit for the console to help bump its mobile specs into something a little more respectable.

GLHF sources can also further corroborate the existence of these behind-closed-doors demos.

Nintendo is expected to announce its next console sometime in the next twelve months, but the company also marches to the beat of its own drum. That is to say: don’t bet on anything, a new console could be announced tomorrow, or it could be announced five years from now.