Nintendo has reportedly added support for Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) and frame rates up to 240 fps to one of its in-house game engines.
A datamine of the new action adventure title from Nintendo, Endless Ocean Luminous, has revealed that it uses an updated version of the console maker’s internally developed Bezel Engine, which now appears to support higher frame rates up to 240 fps despite the Switch only being able to run games up to 60 fps.
Games running on prior versions of the Bezel Engine include both WarioWare titles, both Mario Party titles, Tetris 99, and some third-party Nintendo Switch titles. None of these games include code that indicates support for VRR or support for up to 240 fps. Therefore, the inclusion of both features appears to be very recent, and may have been done in preparation for enhanced backward compatibility support on the Nintendo Switch 2.
As seen in the code snippet below, support for higher frame rates in the new version of the Bezel Engine is only enabled once frame rate mode is changed from “Fixed” to “Variable”.
This information raises several questions regarding the hardware specs of Nintendo’s next console. Will the Switch 2 come with a 240 Hz display? Will the display also support VRR? A previous report from Taiwain’s Economic Daily suggested that the console may feature a 120 Hz display. There was no mention of support for VRR, however.
Given the hardware limitations of a device that will likely run in handheld mode, much like the Nintendo Switch, it’s not practical for modern games to take advantage of frame rates above 60 fps without the availability of VRR support. Performant and less demanding indie titles, however, may be able to maintain an average frame rate in the ballpark of 120 fps. As per the report from Economic Daily, the Switch 2 hardware will be equipped with the NVIDIA T239 chip, 8GB RAM, 64GB storage space, and a battery with greatly improved life.
