Topic: Nintendo Switch Pro and Breath of the Wild 2 graphics

Now I've seen a bunch of rumors about a supposed switch pro and it being 4k, while still being portable. I don't believe that is possible, at least at our time,and the reason for this is look how big 4k consoles are, they are massive! NIntendo usually stays behind in the graphic department, but that doesn't mean they don't make beautiful looking games, they just would rather have quantity over quality with their games, think Mario Odyssey, Pikmin 3, and Botw. I think that Botw 2 will definately be better looking, hyrule warriors cutscenes look so much more alive than botw 1 cutscenes. Since botw 1 originally released on the wii u, the graphics couldn't even come close to Hyrule warriors. The switch is far more powerful than the wii u and hyrule warriors proves it. They are taking better advantage of the switches graphical capabilities, and because botw is just a port to the switch, they didn't bother trying to upscale the game because it still looked awesome, and they probably couldn't upscale the graphics do to time constraints. So this is why i believe Botw 2 will not be 4k, but look so much better then botw 1 because they are taking advantage of the switch hardware, and before you say "well why is their so much lag in hyrule warriors?" its because they have to have hundreds of enemies shown on one of nintendo's best looking games yet, so it makes sense that there is some lag from time to time, even in the cutscene, because they are still figuring it out. If nintendo does come out with a new version of the switch it will probably be a docked only version with a price cut like the switch lite, but 250 because it needs to be on the tv.

Remember this whole article is just what I think, none of this might happen and everything I said could be the complete opposite of what actually happens, I just wanted to share what I think and make predictions, because doing something like what I said above it what makes the most sense to me. Thanks for reading!

Maybe, we'll see. I think Nintendo offering a tv-only variant of the Switch makes a lot of sense. There's a fair number of people who don't care about portable gaming, who only play in docked mode. But I think you're wrong in your idea of the Switch Pro being tv-only.

Personally, I'm a proponent of a couple theories making the rounds.

1) Switch Home - a tv-only Switch variant, bundled with a Pro controller for $200.

2) Switch Pro - will most likely be a Switch V3. Not unlike Nintendo's gradual change from V1 to V2 back in September 2019, which was done to correct a security issue and changed the SoC from 20nm finfet to 16nm finfet for better battery efficiency. The release of the Switch V3 will be low key because the actual compute processing gains from Switch V2 to Switch V3 will be relatively minor.

The Switch V3 will continue to be priced at $300 while the Switch V2 will be phased out of stock.

@Magician yes a tv only variant makes SO much sense. And if nintendo were to make a 4k console, it will be far from now. Nintendo always milks their most successful consoles for years on end, The DS era lasted from 2004 to 2011(7 years), the 3ds era has lasted from 2011 to 2020 after being discontinued marking the end of the 3ds era (9 years), the wii was released in 2006 and was finally discontinued by 2013, marking the end wii era(7 years), the original game boy was released in 1989 and was finally discontinued after 2003 (14 years), and the snes lasted 6 years, so i think it is safe to say that we wont be getting a brand new console with 4k support until 4-7 years from now, cause the switch is wildly successful, and nintendo wouldn't want to make people buy a brand new console for a sequel of one of their best games of all time.

There is no Switch Pro. Still plenty of life left in the Switch.

If Switch Pro does exist, I don't think it's going to be what some people think it's going to be and that expectations are way too high..
Switch Pro "TV Only" - then this is just an underpowered home console. Any Pro model of the base Switch isn't going to stack up to PS5/XBX. They got away with Switch Lite because there is still no viable competitor in the portable market. Even if the Pro was far better, games still need to be made with the lowest common denominator in mind - the Switch itself. Dividing the userbase between Pro and Basic isn't good either. It didn't work so well for 3DS/New 3DS and if they're going to do this, they as well just go full-on Switch 2.
The next revision, I think in all likelihood, is going to be marginal improvements. Mini-LED, improved battery life, a slight boost in graphical capabilities, maybe some other QoL improvements like 2 SD slots and such.

@Shadowthrone what do you mean with mini-LED in this case?

I'll throw in another possibility and that's a Switch XL.

It'd be about the size of a 10" tablet with an accordingly large 1080p screen - so just about portable although you'd need an exceptionally capacious pocket to carry one on your person - but give extra long battery life and the performance of a current docked Switch.

While you could put a 4K screen on it, I just don't think the performance is there to get modern games natively rendering that high, at least not at Nintnedo's usual target prices.

@toiletduck Basically, a better screen than it has now. Mini-LED uses thousands of tiny LED light sources instead of traditional backlighting. Less light spill, better contrast, deeper blacks, brighter screen, potentially improving battery life as well. Nothing to do with the size of the screen itself.

4K from the graphics card inside a portable (of the same size) seems pretty much impossible, as far as I know.

But there are other approaches they might try. They might try and have the dock take on more of the GPU's job. They could either use one of those new Nvidia AI upscaling chips, which can output 4K in really impressive quality (although probably only at 30fps).
Or they might use one of the post-processing chips that just takes over certain features the graphics card would normally do, so you can get a much more impressive output when docked.

@Dezzy I would think that a 4k console would NEED to be docked only, because yes a portable 4k console is impossible for our time, because 4k games need a ton of expensive hardware to run in 4k, im sure sometime in the future we will get a portable 4k console from nintendo, but far from now, and not anytime soon.

@Matt_Barber yeah a more expensive switch with a bigger portable screen would make sense too, a 10" 1080p screen to play nintendo games on is what dreams are made of.

@TheNumbr24

The AI-upscaling could still work though. That operates on a fullscreen output. So it could be located in the dock rather than the console, which means the handheld part would remain fairly similar. But the dock would boost it's resolution massively.

@Shadowthrone thanks