Sponsor Newsletter - January 2025
Time to fill you in on everything that is going on around here...
The AI and Games sponsor newsletter gives a deep-dive into upcoming articles, YouTube videos, and more. Plus we also have a little bit of all the regular content, with announcements and news stories too!
To read the full issue and find out about all more upcoming future content, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Hello all, welcome back to our second newsletter issue of the year. This is our monthly sponsor issue, where the bulk of the issue will be focussed on upcoming content and projects across all things
. I’ll be giving a lowdown on a bunch of things, namely:Over 30 videos we have in production for release across various YouTube channels (some of which will have written versions on Substack too).
Plans for future topics to explore in the weekly newsletter.
An update on where we are with planning for the 2025
Plus, Goal State production has officially started!
But before we get into that, let’s cover some more announcements, and also the news in brief.
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Announcements
As mentioned last week, I’ll be at the 2025 Guildford Games Festival on Friday February 14th. Very excited to be attending this event, and tickets are selling out fast.
The 3rd edition of the Game AI Uncovered book series launches tomorrow on the 23rd of January. This edition contains a bunch of interesting topics, with the highlight being several chapters on the making of Watch Dogs: Legion. You can grab it now from the publisher Routledge and Amazon.
A reminder that I’m organising meetings for GDC 2025! Hit the button to book in a time slot if you want to meet across the week.
AI (and Games) in the News
After the big reveals at CES, the AI news in the games industry has been relatively quiet. But let’s quickly talk about one thing I missed earlier this month, and of course the big story from last week!
The Nintendo Switch 2 is Confirmed for 2025!
The worst kept secret of the games industry is the impending launch of Nintendo’s new console. It was promised to be revealed at some time before the end of the 2024 fiscal year, with a release sometime in the subsequent one. After weeks of rumours and leaks - notably during CES given many peripheral providers had some sort of insight into what was going on - the reveal dropped last week. What is confirmed right now is relatively little beyond what is shown in this video: a slightly larger device, updated screen, joy-cons and seemingly the launch title: Mario Kart 9. The Switch 2 will release in 2025, with further details courtesy of a Nintendo Direct on April 2nd.
It was slightly earlier than I anticipated - I said in the end of year livestream I expected it to be in February - but I think at this point what with leaks running rampant at CES, they’re just happy to get it out there, if only to get internet pundits to stop speculating about the hardware.
But speculate I shall, because critically the hardware specifications have not been announced yet, and that’s why it appears in the
newsletter. It’s long been suspected that the Switch 2 is using a custom version of Nvidia’s T234 processor, which is a mobile CPU/GPU architecture. It’s expected that the T239 chip will be something of an updated version of this Tegra chipset which takes on some of the more recent innovations by the manufacturer. The reason this is of interest to us is that it is expected that the T234 is capable of running some version of Nvidia’s DLSS AI-upscaling technology. Making it the first games console to have it built into the chipset from day one. Since both the Xbox Series S | X and PlayStation 5 run on AMD chipsets, they have access to the non-AI driven upscaling tech AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) - or at least for now, see my next story!I’d suspect, if Nintendo enables support for it, that it would run a modified version of DLSS3 under the hood, which enables both upscaling and frame generation. While Nvidia announced their 4th generation DLSS at CES, if you’re not familiar with what this technology is, check out the YouTube video I released in collaboration with Nvidia back in 2022 on DLSS3 which explains the history in more detail.
So yeah, we’re waiting to hear more in the coming weeks, and as mentioned in my predictions issue last week, a whole bunch of the industry will be holdings its breath to see when this thing comes out, and what games (both 1st and 3rd party) join it!
AI-Powered AMD FSR 4 Shown at CES 2025
Speaking of AMD’s super resolution technology, in all the hubbub of Nvidia's announcements at CES I somehow missed that AMD announced the updated version of FSR. This fourth generation version of the technology is notable in that it has now transitioned from a purely software-based upscaling technology, to joining Nvidia in being an AI-powered technology, though at this time it only does image upscaling and not frame generation. It was shown to a number of news outlets at CES, and appears to be locked to their hardware for the time being, though AMD are known to share the love a lot more than Nvidia who only let their rendering tech run on their proprietary hardware.
This only re-affirms the point raised just last week about graphics card manufacturers perceiving high-end graphics rendering as an AI task, rather than a traditional rendering one. An interesting update for sure…
Behind-the-Scenes Updates
Okay, let’s get into some behind the scenes updates on what’s happening here on AI and Games. As always, this is behind the paywall, and so to find out what’s coming up across all things
, joining as a paid supporter will unlock the rest of the article.
I provide a little teaser of what’s to come above, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Across the paywall we go!
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