Donkey Kong Bananza among Switch 2 games with no DLSS support — reviewers balk at Nintendo's aversion to technology

One of the most notable features of the Nintendo Switch 2 that has many in the gaming community intrigued is its Nvidia DLSS support. Nvidia's AI-powered tech has long been the 800-pound gorilla of upscaling, and it seems especially useful on a console with limited graphics horsepower like the Switch 2.

Despite the fact that DLSS is in the Switch 2 developer's toolkit, however, it's becoming apparent that the technology isn't being universally adopted among devs.

Surprisingly, the holdouts include Nintendo's latest blockbuster, Donkey Kong Bananza. The fine folks at Digital Foundry unpeeled the mystery of missing DLSS support in the title as part of their recent review.

It's also worth pointing out that we reported performance issues earlier this week from Switch 2 developers who are warning users ahead of time to expect some performance drops in Donkey Kong Bananza.

Bananza has been in production for several years, which might be why it's not built to support DLSS. That said, it appears to provide more than adequate graphics using AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR 1) along with Subpixel Morphological Anti-Aliasing (or more simply SMAA), which, as the name suggests, reduces aliasing.

Another big title game that caught our attention in its lack of DLSS support is Mario Kart World. We expected Nintendo's flagship games to be leaders in implementing all of the Switch 2's capabilities, but DLSS is apparently off the table for some. We were disappointed even to learn that Mario Kart World developers failed to properly implement real HDR support.

Time will tell if more developers jumped on the DLSS train or not. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is a highly anticipated upcoming title that might take advantage of Nvidia's DLSS. However, this has yet to be confirmed, so we're not 100% clear what to expect out of this release, either.

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