Back before theNintendo Switch 2dropped, a lot of people were excited about the potential of a more powerful console to play our games on. Now that it’s here, Nintendo has mostly fulfilled those desires,with games like Pokemon Scarlet & Violet,Breath of the Wild, and a lot more looking and running better.
Unfortunately, it seems as though Nintendo is strangely reluctant to use its own console’s best features for dedicated Switch 2 games. One of these features is Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling technology, which multiple third-party studios have made good use of with their recent ports, but Nintendo has decided against using the feature for both its major first-party titles so far.
Donkey Kong Bananza Doesn’t Use One Of The Switch 2’s Best Features
NeitherMario Kart Worldnor the upcomingDonkey Kong Bananzause the Switch 2’s DLSS technology, instead deciding to use a “combination of AMD’s FSR1 with SMAA”. This was first explained ina tech review by John Linneman of Digital Foundry(thanks GamesRadar), in which they claim that the image quality of Donkey Kong Bananza is “decent”, and the decision to use FSR1 is baffling.
Thankfully, the decision doesn’t appear to have impacted Donkey Kong Bananza’s performance too much, even though Linneman says there are a few isolated issues here and there. It’s still very strange though, and you’d assume that Nintendo would want to make its first-party titles shine as brightly as they can to really sell the system,similar to the way that most PlayStation first-party titles do.
That being said, it’s possible that this decision could be down to Donkey Kong Bananza’s long development time. It was recently revealed that the gamehas been in development for around eight years, and, like Mario Kart World,was originally planned as an original Switch title. With that in mind, it’s understandable that these games don’t utilize all the tech the Switch 2 has to offer, and it’s likely we’ll see DLSS whenever we get a game that was made with the Switch 2 in mind.
