The September Nintendo Direct has been shared by a reliable insider alongside more info about the company’s next console.
A number of reliable sources have already claimed that the Nintendo Switch 2 had a secret showing at Gamescom in August, and now a third has added their corroboration and some additional details.
Eurogamer and VGC both claim to have heard of the Switch 2 running Zelda: Breath Of The Wild at a higher frame rate and resolution, which alone sounds very intriguing.
Now, a previously reliable Nintendo insider, Nate The Hate, has parroted these claims while adding a few other details he’s heard, including how Nintendo has managed to reduce load times almost to zero.
Nate The Hate says that the new hardware had Breath Of The Wild running at 60 frames per second at a 4K resolution. However, he says that the real focus of the tech demo was to ‘illustrate improved load times.’
The example he uses is the load times for booting up the game from the main menu. Whereas loading a save file could take somewhere around 30 seconds on the original Switch, Nate The Hate claims it was practically instantaneous on Switch 2: ‘Load times had been erased.’
He goes on to corroborate that The Matrix Awakens tech demo was running on the hardware too, adding that it featured ‘very advanced ray-tracing’ identical to what the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S are capable of.
That doesn’t mean the hardware itself, which is only a prototype, is literally as powerful as the Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 though and instead Nate The Hate suggests that the Switch 2 is somewhere below the Xbox Series S in terms of raw power.
‘It’s going to have more modern technology and that’s where it can put up a fighting chance to compete with those more powerful systems, when it comes to resolutions and maybe even frame [rate] performance in some cases,’ he claims.
New tech such as DLSS (deep learning super sampling) allows lower powered devices to simulate 4K resolution in a way that is almost indistinguishable from native 4K, at far less cost to the performance.
Nate The Hate’s sources suggest that the console supports DLSS 3.5, but that the tech demoes didn’t use more advanced features like frame generation.
He still can’t say whether the Switch 2 will have backwards compatibility or when there’ll be a formal reveal/launch. A March 2024 date was thrown around a lot, but he doesn’t know whether that’s the reveal date, the launch date, or something else.
What he could say, though, is that the next Nintendo Direct will air in ‘about three days’, which is a bit vague but seems to mean Thursday, September 14. Most Nintendo Directs are on a Thursday.
The Switch 2 is not expected to be announced during the Direct but another reliable leaker, Pyoro, has recently been teasing announcements that will be made. The last time they did this in June, a Direct happened that same week.
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