While it is no secret that the Nintendo Switch 2 is capable of making use of Nvidia’s DLSS technology thanks to the company having helped Nintendo in designing the chip powering the console, it looks like one of the major first-party releases doesn’t actually use the technology. According to analysis of the graphics of the recently-released Donkey Kong Bananza by Digital Foundry, the title instead makes use of AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) instead.
“They’re leveraging technology that has been with us for years at this point rather than taking advantage of what the hardware can do,” notes John Linneman of Digital Foundry in the video analysis, which you can check out below. “I’m mainly talking about image quality here. The Switch 2 supports technologies such as DLSS, and we’ve seen them in numerous games. But Nintendo does not take advantage of it at all. Instead we simply have this combination of AMD’s FSR 1 with SMAA—a post-process anti-aliasing.”
Linneman does go on to note that the game still looks excellent. He believes, however, that it could have looked better while also keeping a stable framerate if Nintendo had instead made use of DLSS.
“The issue here is that while edge coverage is pretty good, in-surface aliasing remains an issue, and finer details sort of break apart,” he explained. “Plus, everything looks rather soft. It’s not helped by the rather low target resolution either.”
He went on to note that, typically, Donkey Kong Bananza will swing between 1080p up to 1200p in the course of regular play thanks to dynamic resolution scaling. He also said that the game is able to maintain a resolution of 1080p in handheld mode, noting that this means that the image quality is better when Donkey Kong Bananza is played in handheld mode when compared to docked mode.
The developers of Donkey Kong Bananza—the same studio that also made Super Mario Odyssey—had previously confirmed that development on the title began all the way back in 2017. In an interview, producer Kenta Motokura and director Kazuya Takahashi revealed that the game had been in development for eight years, with work on it starting right after the team was done with Super Mario Odyssey.
Motokura had also confirmed that, originally, Donkey Kong Bananza was envisioned as a game for the original Switch, rather than being a release for the Switch 2. This decision, according to the producer, came down to the fact that the team wanted to make use of voxel technology to allow for environmental destruction. Unfortunately, the hardware powering the original Switch just couldn’t keep up with what the studio wanted.
While we can’t know for sure one way or another, the long development cycle along with originally making the game for the Switch might be some of the reasons why Donkey Kong Bananza ultimately still makes use of the older AMD FSR 1 rather than more modern and vastly-improved versions of technology like Nvidia’s DLSS.
For more details about Donkey Kong Bananza, check out what critics have to say about the game.
