One of the most ambitious titles lined up for the launch of Nintendo Switch 2, Cyberpunk 2077 of CD Projekt Red has been exhibited through the Labor Code in progress seen in the launching tour of the console. Digital Foundry had the opportunity to put into practice at the recent London event and, although our initial impressions are in the registry, many questions remained unanswered. Does the port use Nvidia DLSS? CDPR has confirmed that the answer is yes, what makes this the first known title to use extension technology based on automatic learning.
“We are using a DLSS version available for Nintendo Switch 2 hardware, fed by the Nvidia tensioner nuclei,” the firm told us. “The game uses DLSS in the four ways: on the hand and coupled computer, and the performance and quality variations of each.”
DLSS has been seen as a ‘magic bullet’ in the period prior to the presentation of the Switch 2. In a world where developers are pushing visual technology to the next level, executing games with a complete native performance with consistent performance becomes unfeasible, so the representation to lower representation resolutions is common, with climbers used to produce the final output image. These climbers can vary from the basic bilineal scale to more advanced techniques, such as Taa compensation, where the information of the previous frames feeds on the current one to improve the details.
DLSS is a form of Taa scale, but with a turn, by feeding the lowest resolution framework along with the history of previous frames and other data, such as movement vectors, a neuronal network is used to rebuild the image. As the Switch 2 GPU includes automatic learning tensor centers, there is no reason why no DLSS technology cannot reach Nintendo hybrid, the warning is that there is still a computational cost to use it.
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CD Projakt Red also confirmed that the current objective for the Switch 2 version of the game is to offer different graphics modes: an alternation of quality and performance for hand and docked versions. When connected to a TV, there is a 30 fps quality mode option and a 40 fps yield mode. Presumably, the latter would work only with the television in 120Hz mode: a new picture for every three visualization updates, against the quality mode of 30 fps offered by a new picture for each other update. With consistent yield, both must be soft, with the mode of 40 fps sitting between 30 fps and 60 fps in terms of fluidity. Both modes are using 1080p as a output resolution with dynamic resolution scale in effect in combination with DLSS.
Portable mode, as things are, is slightly different. Necessarily, since the system performance is lower. In this scenario, the quality mode is still generating an image of 1080p with DLSS and dynamic resolution scale, again aimed at 30 fps. The performance mode sees that the output resolution decreases to 720p, with the portable screen in 120Hz mode and 40 fps as a goal.
In terms of input resolutions, our initial pixel counts from the very, very short fragment of images seen in Nintendo Direct delivered readings of 540p to 1080p, and the fact that we could tell it at all made us doubt if DLSS was at stake. CD Projakt Red has also confirmed that “the scale can vary from 2x and up per axis”, so, according to the GPU load, the Upscaler DLSS will feed with anything from 540p to 1080p in the quality modes of 30 fps and the performance mode of 40 fps coupled. For portable performance mode iteration, the 2x scale and above would suggest DRS between 360p and 720p, depending on the GPU load.
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The compatibility of DLSS had been mentioned by Nintendo and NVIDIA in previous public relations, but its use in Cyberpunk 2077 (and in hand and coupled configurations, nothing less) is our first confirmation of the technology used in a launch title. However, we are seeing a slightly different use of DLS compared to the PC. There, it is generally the case that the elements after processing are represented in the same output resolution. So, if you are broadcasting 1080p of a 540p image, there are still components of the image that must be represented at 1080p complete.
It may be the case that Cyberpunk 2077 is still representing those postprocessing components in the input resolution, which can explain why we can see the obvious edges of staircases that make the pixel count possible. As you will see in the DF Direct published today, it seems to be the oldest neuronal network version of DLSS that is being used, not the DLSS 4.0 transformer model recently coined from NVIDIA.
In our practice with Cyberpunk 2077 at the Switch 2 London event, our impression was that the CDPR Progress Labor Code was recognizably Ciberpunk, but we found many situations in which it seemed that both the CPU and the GPU were overweight, which resulted in some performance falls. However, the code was seven weeks at that time with a lot of remaining development time until the launch of Switch 2 on June 5. We see Cyberpunk 2077 as something like a reference game, and I can’t wait to see the final code in the new Nintendo console.