Digital Foundry: DLSS in Fallout 4 for Switch 2 almost doesn’t change the picture
Bethesda rolled out NVIDIA DLSS support for Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition on Switch 2 last week. You can enable it in both 40 fps and 60 fps modes; the promise was simple — smoother performance and cleaner visuals.
Digital Foundry’s analysis, however, found only small wins. At 40 fps, side‑by‑sides reveal almost no visible improvement. Flip to 60 fps and there’s some payoff: edges look a touch sharper and a few annoying flickers in static scenes disappear.
On the frame‑rate side, gains are modest too. 60 fps sees a minor boost in stability (avg. frame variance drops slightly), but there’s no big uplift, and world‑movement stutters still crop up.
Bethesda implemented a pared‑down build known as DLSS Light, tuned for Switch 2’s limits. It’s less compute‑heavy than the full neural‑net DLSS used on PC (and in some larger Switch 2 ports), so the tradeoffs are unsurprising.
That said, full DLSS on the console can be more impactful elsewhere. Resident Evil: Requiem, for example, shows a clearer benefit — looking better than the Xbox Series S version in some comparisons, even at lower resolution. So, Fallout 4’s DLSS feels like a subtle polish rather than a transformation; whether that matters will depend on what each player notices and cares about.