It’s official! The Nintendo Switch 2 supports ray tracing and NVIDIA’s DLSS tech to improve gameplay

Karthik Iyer | Apr 3 2025 - 9:40 am PT

Nintendo’s Switch 2 is now official and it comes with a bevy of new features that we got to experience when we went hands-on with the handheld for nearly six hours yesterday. While we learned a lot about the handheld during its announcement, it wasn’t exactly clear whether it would support ray tracing. Well, we now know that the Switch 2 does indeed support ray tracing for games. In fact, Nintendo also confirmed that the Switch 2 uses NVIDIA’s DLSS tech to improve your gameplay experience. Head below for more details.

Ray tracing and DLSS support confirmed for Switch 2

As confirmed via an official blog post, the Switch 2 is powered by a custom NVIDIA processor featuring an NVIDIA GPU with dedicated RT Cores and Tensor Cores. This means we’ll see many games, presumably the likes of Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition, making use of things like RT Shadows and RT Reflections to deliver a better visual experience. You may not necessarily notice these details in handheld mode, but many of these finer details will shine when the handheld is docked for playing on a bigger screen.

We still don’t know much about the CPU and GPU powering the Switch 2, so it’s hard to tell how well the games will play with ray tracing enabled. There’s nothing to worry about if you’re not able to get a smooth experience with ray tracing at native resolutions because the Switch 2 also uses NVIDIA’s DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) tech to upscale lower-resolution images in real time to enhance both performance and image quality in games. That’s right, the GPU’s Tensor Cores will enable DLSS support which the developers can use to improve their game’s performance on Switch 2.

The blog post also notes that the Tensor Cores will enable AI-powered face tracking and background removal in video chat. This will come in handy for folks who are planning to pick up the new Nintendo camera for social gaming and streaming. We’re still waiting to hear more about the specifications of the CPU and GPU used for Switch 2, though these new details shared by NVIDIA look promising. “With 10x the graphics performance of the Nintendo Switch,” the Switch 2 is definitely looking like a no-brainer upgrade for now.