 Alright before I get into this video I want to remind you that we are sponsored by E-Win Racing. You can get 20% off their chairs right now, they got a nice Valentine's Day holiday sale happening. They have chairs for all types and sizes. I have 3 of them in my office. I love them, been using them for years. Can't suggest them enough. They also allow you to do easy pay with Afterpay and Klarna where you can split your payments over 4 different payments to make them affordable right now today. Go ahead and check out E-Win Racing through the link in the description down below. So today I want to talk to you about a couple of things and one of those is going to be the possible date for the upcoming assumed Nintendo Direct. Again, a lot of your caveat words there because nothing's been announced. Also we need to talk about a new patent from Nintendo. Now let's first dive into the patent because this patent provides some information that you can argue has been rumored for a while but now we have some confirmation. Now they've been patents related to upscaling games in the past for Nintendo and we know that Nintendo is using a form of upscaling today with games like Nintendo Switch Sports. They're using FSR, Fidelity Super Resolution, which is AMD technology, but is able to be used on older generation GPUs as well as obviously AMD GPUs that get results to let you upscale lower resolution output games to higher resolution and make them look crisper and nicer. Get a little bit of a performance pump with the frame rates as well. But how Fidelity Super Resolution does it is different than the way that Nvidia does it. Now we know Nvidia has technology inside the Switch to take our X1, unfortunately the way Nvidia does it didn't exist at the time of the chip being made so it's just not compatible basically and that's deep learning super sampling. Now we've talked about this before and I'm not going to dive too deep into it because we have a lot of rumors that suggest that DLSS is going to be part of the 4K future for Nintendo's next platform. Obviously the Nintendo's next platform will be able to have games at 4K through DLSS, that's basically the way it's done. Well Nintendo really stay patent about a neural network AI upscaler for images and games. Now they don't specifically say games, but how the neural network stuff works is related to taking an image and making really damn good guesswork of what the pixels around it would be if it was at a higher resolution and doing it practically in real time guessing about a frame ahead of time, that way they could produce a higher quality image. This is exactly how DLSS works, DLSS deep learning super sampling uses a neural network AI to accomplish this. So it might sound scary when you're hearing neural network and AI, people worry about AI taking over the world, but this isn't new technology, this is something that Nvidia has been doing for a long time. Now why would Nintendo then, if Nvidia already has technology for it, need to have their own patent exist for a technology that already exists from a company they're partnered with. And I think the biggest reason isn't that it looks like in this patent that anything's done differently, from what I can tell how this works is very similar to how DLSS works and you can see examples of images that improves, granted we're not looking at 4K images here. We're going to the super low resolution stuff and zoom in way in, but what I think it does make a difference in is that whatever version of DLSS Nintendo uses, I think it's going to end up being a fully customized version. So while it will be based on Nvidia's deep learning super sampling, it will be a specific version of DLSS that no other device has. Now this doesn't mean it's going to be a better version, but I think it's going to be one specifically tailored to the exact hardware inside the Nintendo Switch 2 or whatever it ends up becoming. And that's important to note because Nintendo's obviously going to have preset hardware and be selling it for 5, 6, 7 years, Nvidia naturally upgrades their DLSS every year or two. So having a version that's specifically tailored for the hardware, the exact specs I think is something worth paying attention to. I kind of think that's what this patent is for. It is a patent for AI upscaling through a neural network that is tailored to whatever this next hardware is. There's no hardware details in here, so we can't extract that, but I do think it's noteworthy because this patent does confirm in some ways that Nintendo has been looking into neural network AI upscaling like DLSS to upscale their games in the future. I think this is a really important thing when it comes to all those rumors and reports and people that think it was all fake. Hey, this is a piece of actual stuff that Nintendo put out there sort of proving that yes, they were indeed working on this stuff at one point. So there is that. You might go, well, at one point, that doesn't mean they're not working on it now. The work on it could be done. It could be something we see in the future, et cetera. So it's not something to really worry about now. And the patent is for a technology that already exists, but it's just a customized version. That being said, we also need to talk a little bit about Nintendo Direct. Look, obviously it's been the hot button topic all January. We're waiting on that Nintendo Direct. We want to know what's happening. We want to know when Tears of the Kingdom is going to start getting advertised. We want to know what's next besides Tears of the Kingdom. What's after? When's Pikmin 4 coming out? Are we getting a Mario game? What's happening with the DLC for Mario Kart and Swatoon and Xenoblade? There's a lot of things we want to know. What third-party games are coming? Are we going to see Hogwarts Legacy running natively on Switch? Is that a thing? Is it going to see Gollum run natively on Switch? That's another third-party game. What are we going to see? Are we going to get a release date for Hollow Knight? What about GoldenEye 007? Who knows? Maybe that ends up releasing this week. A shadow drop with Xbox tomorrow. But the point is we want to know what's next. And the biggest thing is trying to predict when the Direct will be. We had some speculation and rumors from Paul Gale Network on a smaller event happening this month. With nothing announced today, I would argue there probably isn't going to be anything in January. So whatever sources Paul Gale Network had on that were must have been mistaken, at least at this point. Technically they could still announce something tomorrow for Thursday. So I don't want to completely rule it out, but I'm kind of thinking there isn't going to be anything. I mean, I guess they could probably squeeze in an indie world or something if they want. They did do one in December, so it would be interesting if they did them back-to-back, but that's alright. But when we look to February, look at the last four years. The last four years there's sort of been a consistent pattern with their Directs. And I'm going to give some credit here to fellow channel Mike Odyssey for pointing this out, and I just went back and confirmed his research just to make sure he's right on this, and he is. And that is that these Directs have not only happened in February, there's a pattern to them. One, they all happened on a Wednesday. That's an interesting note. We've all been thinking Tuesdays and Thursdays, a Wednesday. So there's that to think about. Why Wednesday? I don't know. I guess Nintendo's being consistent about Wednesdays for the February Direct, specifically. Not the Fall Direct, not the September Direct, not the E3 One. We're talking specifically about this one. The E3 One's usually on Tuesday. This one's now on Wednesday, and the Fall one's on Thursday. So we kind of have an idea of the day of the week. But we also have an idea of when Nintendo tends to drop them because based on the last four, there's a pattern that if they have a game releasing in February, whether it's small or big, it just has to be a Nintendo published game. It could be a published indie game, or it could be a published major game. And we have Kirby coming up, that they tend to do the Direct the week before that game comes out. So Kirby releases on February 24th, and with the 24th being there, and all the prior last four Directs happening on a Wednesday, and any of them that had a game releasing that month happened the week before, that kind of puts the target date at February 15th. Now this is just a pattern recognition thing. This is not a confirmation. This is not a rumor or a massive leak from some insider. This is more so just doing some sleuth work, confirming that sleuth work of Mike Odyssey, and seeing, yeah, Wednesday, the 15th of February, seems like the most likely date based on recent patterns from Nintendo the last four years. So kind of keep that date in mind. That's not that far away. What are we? Three weeks? Three weeks from tomorrow? That's really not that far away when you think about it. Finally we should see Tears of the Kingdom again. Finally we should see what's coming after. Finally we should see an idea of how Nintendo is going to handle their 2023, because for the most part, they announce most of the games coming in the current year in this Direct. Even the second half games that are coming, they might even say this Direct is for the first half of 2023, and then they end up announcing three or four games for the second half anyways. This happens every single time. We know you can't take what Nintendo says about that. In the first half of 2023, it's what this Direct is about, two literally, Nintendo basically means a majority of the Direct. Say it's a 35, a 40 minute Direct. So 25 to 30 minutes of it will be about the stuff coming in the first half, and then the rest will be the stuff coming in the second half. That's just how Nintendo does it. Plus there's this idea that Nintendo might mean by first half, they might mean first half of the fiscal year, which then that actually runs right up into the fall. So anyways, you guys let me know what you think about this down in the world. Do you think we're going to get a Direct February 15th? Do you think it makes sense? And do you think Mike Odyssey's right? Because he's the one that pointed this out and I wanted to bring it to your attention because I think he's onto something. Are you excited for the idea of the neural network AI upscaler? Likely a custom version of DLSS. That's my speculation. Also a fun fact, there's this little thing that popped up on Twitter that I'm just going to briefly mention. Essentially, the German and Aussie boards have registrations for Fire Emblem Engage dating back to 2021. And they basically say that the product was produced in 2021. Now we don't know exactly what that means, but the inference that a lot of people are getting from and including the person who originally posted about it is that this means Fire Emblem Engage was actually done in 2021, at least development wise. Maybe there were still some tweaking or final localization, but the main development was done in 2021. And then they just sat on it. Now Nintendo's sitting on games shouldn't be new. You think logically about things, felt like Breath of the Wild was probably sat on for an extra year because of the Switch. Mario Odyssey was probably originally a Wii U game. Feels like that game was probably sat on. We actually saw that in 2016. There's a lot of things that I think we can point to Nintendo in the past, having sat on games for an extended period of time. But this is one of the few times they would have sat on something that we weren't aware of, right? Like Fire Emblem Engage wasn't announced in 2021. It was announced late 2022 for January. And it released and came out as a really well-polished, decently received, well-received game by fans definitely, decently received by reviewers. So this kind of matters a little bit. It's only a smidge because of rumors that exist out there that Nintendo is sort of sitting on a stockpile of games that are already done. Things like Metroid Prime Remake, or maybe even Twilight Princess and Wind Waker, or maybe sitting on the next Mario game or something where Nintendo might have games done and they're just trying to decide when to release them or what's going to get moved to the next platform. You know, we are probably heading towards the transition period in the next couple of years to the new platform. So I do think that this is just something worth paying attention to. But yeah, by the way, I don't think Tears of the Kingdom is one of those games they were sitting on. I'm just going to be open and honest about it. I don't think it was. There's a possibility it was done last year and they just decided this is a better release timing in May of this year. But I don't think that's the case. I think they honestly did need extra development time. Zelda is a little bit of a different beast than some of their other games. They used their largest development team with their biggest budget. So I can see why COVID might have caused those delays and they still were working on the game last year. And probably at least polishing it up this year. All right, guys. Thank you so much for tuning in. I am Nathan, a RoboJet from Nintendo Prime. Let me know what you think about all this stuff down in the comments below. We'll be back on camera here at some point this week. Just doing a little organizing, let's say, in the studio. Catch you guys in the next video.