Nintendo Switch: Thread 08

[Golgo]

Oh i have it on PS4 already yeah it was indeed buggy mainly as the poor PS4 really struggled to render that huge environment so there were times if you travelled too fast you ended up going through the floor. Or the times i got stuck in the walls or the times that the damn moonpool entrance was solid instead of passing through to dock so when i tried to dock my seamoth it just went bonk against a solid surface instead of letting me in lol. To be fair though they are a small dev team and they did try to fix a lot of it, with the latest fixes a lot of my playthrough was a lot better i can see the level does load in a lot faster now as you traverse through it.

Despite the bugs though i absolutely loved it, just weird that amazon has a release date for it on switch yet i can't find any release date for ps4 only mentions steam so far. Below zero is something i have been looking forward to for a long time, this is one game that genuinely scares the crap out of me. Even now i still can't play it with headphones on.

I really do want to play it so if they make a good conversion I'll be in.

[importaku]

I really do want to play it so if they make a good conversion I'll be in.

I'm very curious to see how well the switch can handle the world as it's one huge map there's no loading once your in apart from the warp gates that have a transition that takes a while when you go through one so i'm guessing it is loading then. Obviously talking about the first game i have no idea what the second one is like apart from watching a few lets plays of the pre build on pc via youtube.

Very tempted by double pack but i have a feeling it's going to be the second game on there and you have to download the first game as digital only so that's a no for me.

[kryss]

Update for Animal Crossing coming March 18th: https://www.nintendo.com/whatsnew/de...s-new-content/

More customisable items, more design slots, access to the design portal from your NookPhone.

Next week there will be an Island Tour creator so you can make posters or trailers for your island (until the end of the year oddly).

Also:

Embedded Tweet

Exclusive items through your Nook Points on your phone. Like the nook poster from resident services!

[importaku]

Time for a goatse stand in my town that you can put your face in

[Asura]

(until the end of the year oddly)

this is gaming now

[Cepp]

NEOGEO POCKET COLOR SELECTION Vol.1



Looks good, although the Switch didn't feel like the best way to play Gal Fighters from the time I spent with it. I'm hoping the Analogue Pocket feels better or failing that, an original system and flash cart.

[fishbowlhead]

More rumours surface about the new Switch model using an all new chipset with DLSS from Nvidia.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/23/22346041/oled-nintendo-switch-dlss-nvidia-chip-report

[fuse]

It's getting thrown around enough that I think we're overdue now on a thread where someone (virtually) sits down and explains what DLSS is, as if explaining it to a child. That'd be really useful for me for you all.

[briareos_kerensky]

It's un upscaling algorhythm using AI.

[Asura]

It's getting thrown around enough that I think we're overdue now on a thread where someone (virtually) sits down and explains what DLSS is, as if explaining it to a child. That'd be really useful for me for you all.

I can do that.

Normally, when you want to render an image at a higher resolution, it's very computationally expensive. On paper, if you double the resolution, you're rendering 4x as many pixels, but there are other things also - like if you increase the res, your textures need to be higher detail on models, meaning that you need more memory (RAM) too. Basically higher res means more powerful hardware.

As resolution goes up, this progression is geometric - i.e. like I've said above, asking for twice the resolution means significantly more than 4x the power. To overly simplify, back on the original Xbox, the games were rendered at 480p (640x480, ~300,000 pixels), while modern 4k is 3840x2160 (~8.3 million pixels, or 27x more!).

The bulk of Switch games render at 720p (~900,000 pixels), so if you were going to increase the resolution to 4k to have better support for 4k TVs, the back-of-a-ciggy-packet maths means you need to render 9x as many pixels as the present Switch.

However, there is another solution to this.

If you just "blow up" an image from a low-res to a high res, you either get a pixelly, blocky image, or you get a smeary resampled image. This is because you're basically magnifying the original image. However, it is much faster/easier than actually rendering a higher resolution image.

In recent years, a lot of research has been poured into AI-based upscalers. These are programs where you give the computer a small image, and ask it "What does this look like at 10x the size?", and the computer "hallucinates" the extra detail. Waifu2X is a well-known one:



On the left shows a small image "blown up", the right side is an AI-based upscaler. What's happened here is that the AI-based upscaler has been "fed" thousands of images of anime characters, and then it uses machine-learning to try and figure out what a sharp, high-res version of that image would look like (this is what I mean when I say "hallucinate", as that's the best comparison).

So, how does this tie in to DLSS?

Well, DLSS is a tool which does something like this. It can take a lower resolution game, say 720p, and blow it up to 4k using machine learning. It's a bit cleverer than this in isolation; I think what the developer does, on a low level, is "feed" the DLSS some things at 4k resolution and some things at 720p, and DLSS's machine learning algorithms do the rest.

The important part is that this is much faster than actually rendering at a full 4k.

Now bear in mind, it's not perfect. You're watching a computer's hallucination of high detail. DigitalFoundry has some videos about thism where they show a few areas of Control where the effect breaks down a bit, but usually it's pretty minor and overall the tradeoff is worth it.

tl;dr, DLSS makes it possible to display higher res games on weaker hardware, causing only small visual problems, using black magic.

[fuse]

It's un upscaling algorhythm using AI.

Cheers - that's about all that I needed to know. Hope no-one else goes to the trouble of explaining in any more detail.

[teddymeow]

Cheers - that's about all that I needed to know. Hope no-one else goes to the trouble of explaining in any more detail.

[fishbowlhead]

Witchcraft, would of also been an acceptable explanation Asura 🙂

[wakka]

Useful post, thanks [MENTION=5941]Asura[/MENTION]

[fuse]

It sounds a lot like post-processing - I get the performance benefit, but does it not cause a consistent latency issue? I'm sure that there is an angry mob with pitchforks at my door already for even considering it, but would this kind of thing not make for a really interesting (universal) upscaling product?