Article · AI translation
IT Home reported on November 2 that the Nintendo Switch 2 was successfully hacked last month, more than a year after its launch. This opened the floodgates: users can now run homebrew programs on the console and extract game images, paving the way for Switch 2 games to run on PC emulators. For PC gamers, however, merely running games at higher resolutions is far from enough. Through emulators and Nvidia's DLSS 5 neural rendering technology, we can glimpse a rather intriguing possible future for Nintendo games.
IT Home noted that a new video recently surfaced online in which creator ChillyWillMD demonstrated Mario Kart World running on a PC with Nvidia DLSS 5 neural rendering. Just days after a Switch 2 emulator solution appeared, the RTX 5060 Ti graphics card was already able to deliver 60 frames per second, which is noteworthy in itself (although emulators depend more heavily on CPU performance, and the demonstration used a Core i9-13900K with ample processing power). But the real highlight of the demonstration was how neural rendering transformed the visuals.
Nintendo has never placed much emphasis on anti-aliasing, leaving visible jagged edges, particularly on character models; the lighting from the race cars' headlights also has considerable noise. Still, the lighting changes brought by DLSS 5 undeniably make the game look almost like the Super Mario movie, rather than a native Switch 2 game. There are currently few striking examples of DLSS 5 neural rendering in games with stylized art, and Mario Kart World is a good example of what could be possible in the future.
Compared with other emulated games using DLSS 5 neural rendering, Mario Kart World offers a more realistic vision of the future, for a simple reason: the Switch series is currently the only mainstream game console line whose chips are supplied by Nvidia, and the Switch 2 includes only a lightweight version of DLSS upscaling. It is therefore reasonable to speculate that the next-generation Switch console may well add the remaining capabilities in Nvidia's DLSS suite, such as frame generation and neural rendering. Nintendo itself has been cautious about making full use of Nvidia's technology, but if it makes these capabilities available to third-party developers, the new console could gain features that distinguish it from competitors.