Its a fighting game so i dont think its a demanding game. I mean tekken 5 was good on the psp and even street fighter 4 was ported to the 3ds

Eh, i wouldn't say it looks 7th gen, the shaders and effects work still have that distinctive current gen look, whereas 7th gen games tended to look less nuanced, plainer shading. Here's MK9 for instance, a late release for PS3/360. Definitely looks a lot more dated than MK11 Switch.

Agreed, in the sense this genre isn't as complex as many other genres. But it also depends on the engine the game is using.

I mean Tekken 7 and Soul Calibur VI seem to struggle on 8th gen consoles in regard to resolution. The base X1 especially which even lowers some graphics settings. DOA has been a technical marvel in past generations, but DOA6 was disappointing and only hits 1080p on X1X at 60 fps.

These NetherRealm fighters however have made the wise decision of sticking with Unreal Engine 3. Which seem to deliver good visuals at a higher resolutions and stable performance. Had this been built with UE4, there might not have been a Switch version.

Switch has native UE4 support and several games on the engine have been successfully converted to it such as Hellblade, Snake Pass, Fortnite, and Claybook.

I knew somebody was gonna think I was comparing this directly to MK9. I'm not doing that.

MK9 (2011) is much older at this point but it was a polished game for the time. Around 2014 it seems games really started using more advanced lighting effects that added depth. I've said before I was really impressed with the lighting in Destiny even on PS360, that's where I started to notice other games look flat in comparison. CoD Advanced Warfare was also doing ambitious lighting effects on 7th gen specs.

I prefer the presentation of MK9 versus MK11 on Switch. Its sharper and the textures aren't muddy. MK11 on Switch just looks like a game scaled back with minimal effort, as opposed to a product built for Switch specs (which it is). Kinda remind me of Injustice on Vita. It was an impressive effort, but it doesn't feel like it was handled with care or tried to leverage the limited specs. These feel more like tech demos to me.

It's not the best looking game on Switch, nor perhaps even the best port, but I think the results are decent considering its a console game running on a contemporaneous mobile chip at 60fps.

One of the main things that make 7th and 8th gen games look different is the adoption of Physically Based Rendering on modern systems, something almost totally unseen on PS3/360. MK11 on Switch still looks like it includes this, which makes it look more like a product of this generation than the last.

Switch has shown in multiple cases it can handle modern games, albeit at a much lower visual fidelity. At some point though I'm not so impressed anymore and its just par for the course. MK11 on Switch is fine, these ports are now just looking like what I expect. People act like every new port means something, but they all kinda hit the same level. They play like other consoles with much lower visual fidelity (muddy/blurry). Sticking with UE3 helped as well I'm sure.

I'm curious to see Doom Eternal on Switch, but I think its gonna look exactly like what we expect, other id shooters but just a little more polished.

7th gen games ended when physically based rendering started to becoming the norm. Maybe that's partly why Switch ports need to reduce the resolution so much. Its interesting to see Switch doing these modern effects, but 7th gen games were generally not this blurry and muddy. Hence, I prefer games that look polished and sharp versus "modern." That's kinda the secret to 1st party Nintendo games. They don't push cutting edge graphics or effects but they're very polished and age well.

Lastly, Halo 4 on X1 arguably looks better than Halo 5 on X1. We both know Halo 5 is pushing much more advanced effects and assets, but Halo 4 is making less compromises that Halo 5 has to make like lower resolution, pop in, reduced animation frames, etc. In the end Halo 4 actually looks better just because it appears more polished. Hence, I'm fan of pulling back demanding effects in favor of polish.

Not all Switch ports hit the same level; they can range quite wildly from total garbage (Ark, WWE 2K18) to superb. (Outlast II, Hellblade) I'll wait on DF, but for the moment MK11 seems to be solid.

It's not just a matter of resolution; there were many sub-HD games on PS3/360, one of the reasons demanding Switch ports like Doom and Wolfenstein II look soft is that they use temporal AA, which was rare last gen but has since become pretty much industry standard. Temporal AA eradicates aliasing much more effectively than the AA methods more commonly used on last gen, but at the cost of softening the image. PS3/360 games generally have a lot more jaggies than Switch games.

The engine they use also matters. I mean Ark is a mess because it always was and UE4 is taxing. Games that were built for next gen and ported to Switch can be a mixed bag. WWE was an exceptionally bad port job, it was probably GPU related as well so they should have just let the resolution drop and pull back the visuals more. Outlast II was impressive and I'm sure because it was built on UE3. Hellblade seems like had more effort than the usual port, but still low res and muddy.

Based on the video it looks like MK11 is fine. Even the Vita did a good job handling some of their fighters with little compromise in gameplay.

I agree that games are using post processing effects that make the presentation too blurry. Its also an issue on X1, but a much bigger problem on Switch obviously. I prefer the jaggies over the soft image based on much of the last gen, maybe developers should give users a choice.

The engine matters, I agree there, but so does the talent, effort, and investment put into it. The level of quality is not the same between the various ports on Switch; they're handled by numerous different studios which are not all equal in ability or resources.