DLSS 5 on Nintendo Switch OLED: How I Made It Work

Honestly, this is one big piece of clickbait, and I strongly recommend you don’t read it here.

First, it’s yet another article about DLSS 5. Second, you already know how I got DLSS 5 running on a Nintendo Switch OLED! THE FRESHEST FILES ARE HERE

I Ran DLSS 5 on Pong and Lada Racing Club: It’s Still a Very Raw Model

So, you started the article anyway. And just to disappoint you, I’ll give you the answer right away: Sunshine + Moonlight + Kefir + Switch OLED. And yes, not through Android – through Native.

But… First, nobody on the internet has written about how to run DLSS 5 on a Nintendo Switch yet, and second, I want to pour in a little filler.

Introduction… I mean… Filler

As of today, a Nintendo Switch OLED on Atmosphère CFW is my main gaming device. Where a full-blown PC or a laptop (oh the horror, on a 5090 Mobile) gets forgiven neither a micro-stutter nor the slightest FPS drop below 240… the Switch gets forgiven all of it, just for the chance to flop onto the couch and play console-style. Which means a drop from 180 to an almost cinematic 30 FPS courtesy of neural rendering has finally found me – its consumer.

And the Switch (in the OLED flavour, no less) is also the perfect way to play games from 20 years ago. Why? Because on a little screen the polygons don’t hit you in the eye the way they do on a 27-incher.

That’s all there is to it. Yeah… yeah… yeah… Of course, there’s the Steam Deck too, and you can bolt the same Moonlight onto it. But have you seen the prices?

A Switch Lite modded with Atmosphère can be had for $100–150, the OLED version – literally $100 more. And you get access to:

1. The entire Nintendo library.
2. All of homebrew.
3. And now every modern game as well – in the best graphics, with DLSS 5 neural rendering.

How It Was All Done, and What the Pitfalls Were

Generally speaking, it all looked perfectly cloudless:

1. Take a Switch OLED.
2. Crack it open.
3. Modchip it (the “kamikaze” method).
4. Install Atmosphère.

That’s it. The whole of step one is done.

Step Two. Download Sunshine for x86 From the official GitHub. Install it.

But, as tends to happen in cases like this, the September build of the Sunshine streaming host (the latest one) pulled a dirty little trick on me. Namely… I couldn’t get inside the WebUI, because Chrome stubbornly refused to load the HTTPS version.

https://localhost:47990/ – the port for getting into Sunshine.

I had to roll back to the May one. Why, how and what exactly my system didn’t like, I didn’t bother figuring out, because I’m very dumb.

What to look out for? Emulated Gamepad Type – Xbox 360. Otherwise most games, for some reason, take the Switch for a PS controller.

That’s it… Almost done.

Step 3. Don’t Forget to Cut the N*ntendo Switch Off From N*ntendo’s Servers

However smart Atmosphère may be, however good the firmware may be, nobody around here wants their modded N*ntendo Switch banned…

Which means you have to connect the Switch to the computer over MTP. Find atmosphere/hosts, find the little file default.txt in there, and write a few things from here into it.

The procedure is standard and short, but… necessary.

Step 4. Installing Moonlight

We find Moonlight for Nintendo Switch in the repository. We install it. We enjoy life.

The one thing – you have to install it not through SD install, but straight into sd/switch/Moonlight-Switch.

Step 5. Connect the Switch to the Same Wi-Fi Network as the Streaming Machine

There was a bit of a snag here – to stream PC games to the Switch over Wi-Fi both devices have to sit on one subnet, and my laptop was connected to the router by cable, while modern routers put wireless and wired devices on different subnets. I had to fiddle with the router settings: unplug the laptop from the cable and connect it over Wi-Fi.

Step 6. Set the Bitrate – Enjoy Life

In my case the Moonlight bitrate settings came out as the H.265 codec + 17 Mbit/s. Enough to carry a 720p screen with no visual artifacts (although the first bits of footage were recorded at 10 Mbit/s).

So What About DLSS 5?

Instead of messing about with hooking up OptiScaler and ReNoDX by hand for DLSS 5 on a handheld, I use “DLSS5oneclick” – it’s simply a bundler that automatically wires in the feeder, ReNoDX and everything else you need. Plus dgVoodoo2_87_3 – to wrap DX 8–9 games up to DX 11.

So What’s the Verdict

On the one hand, an absolutely pointless experiment. I’m not the first and not the last person to run Moonlight on a Switch. And I know it can be done better: run Android on the Switch, and the same Moonlight on top of that, and get a higher bitrate.

But! Is DLSS 5 running on the Nintendo Switch OLED? It is. Does KCD2 work? It works, and the picture over streaming is a whole lot better than the native KCD1 port. I’d even say the two aren’t in the same league.

And that’s that. I promised you clickbait. I promised – and here it is.