Who Needs Switch Pro? New Dongle Promises To “Instantly Upgrade Switch To 4K”
A new dongle promises to automatically upscale the Switch to 4K with zero lag, and it’s coming to Kickstarter this April.
The 4K Gamer Pro is the follow-up to the 4K Gamer+, which was launched in Asia in 2021. It’s a plug-and-play device that takes the 1080p output of the Switch (and other devices) and converts it into 4K.
The 4K Gamer Pro offers “a 20% increase in sharpness, colouring, and depth of field” compared to the previous model. The manufacturer claims that “months of researching and testing” have enabled it to drastically improve on what has gone before.
The 4K Gamer Pro isn’t the first device of its kind. As well as the previous 4K Gamer+ model from the same company, there’s the Marseille mClassic already on the market. When we covered that product last year, we noted that:
Until we see what Nintendo has in store for its rumoured ‘Switch Pro’, it’s hard to say if the mClassic is truly transformative. It most certainly improves the image produced by the Switch (and other systems), but the impact is so slight in many cases that you might be hard-pushed to actually notice it. For $100, the mClassic is quite an investment – and one that may not offer the improvement many people expect.
4K output has been on many people’s wish lists for a while now. A teardown of the Switch OLED dock suggests that it’s ready to handle a 4K signal, and Nintendo has reportedly been asking developers to make their games 4K-ready. There are other reports that suggest Nintendo will make use of AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution technology in the future. At the moment, though, the Switch is very much a 1080p system – so there’s certainly room for devices like this in the market.
Could the 4K Gamer Pro offer an improvement over what has gone before? We’re hopefully being sent a unit for evaluation and will report back when it arrives and we’ve put it through its paces.