Digital Foundry Analysis Video Mortal Kombat 11: Switch vs PS4/Pro/Xbox One/X - From Handheld To 4K!

[Pemalite]

Mr Puggsly said:

Pemalite said:

If you want to retain 60fps, there is going to be some serious concessions to visual fidelity, which happened on the Switch.
But in saying that... 60fps is certainly more important than texture resolution or output resolution for a fighting game, responsiveness is absolute key.

With that said... The Xbox One version doesn't exactly escape unscathed either, it looks like a dogs breakfast, it just doesn't have the chunky bits the Switch version has that takes it a step down.

I believe the texture quality on Switch is more about RAM. This game was designed for consoles with 5GB to work with, maybe 3GB for Switch? Either way, certainly less than what the game was designed for. Memory often plays a bigger role on texture quality versus other resources like GPU and CPU. I mean the reason X1X has better textures is a massive memory increase, while PS4 Pro textures are generally the same.

One thing I noticed about some of the final ports to 7th gen games was the texture quality became very poor. I suspect that was likely due to the more memory demanding games/engines so the compromise was low quality textures. Some have said limited storage is the problem but I don't buy that.

The base X1 version looks fine, I'm not sure what you're talking about. Based on the video its somewhere below 900p to 1080p, with little compromise to graphics settings. You're understating the disparity between X1 and Switch.

Ram is a big part of it, not just capacity but bandwidth as well.
So is the Texture Mapping Units on a GPU too... And so many other factors.

In short the Switch has 1/3rd of the texture mapping units as the Xbox One... But each unit as it's Maxwell derived should be vastly more efficient than what the Xbox One has, granted the Xbox has a much larger amount of them to make up for it.

When it comes to rendering it's very difficult to just point to a single aspect and claim it's the sole culprit, typically the issue is a top-to-bottom problem, there are so many stages that introduce limitations in a GPU's design.

As for the 7th gen taking a hit with texture quality is actually rather simple to explain... As we entered the 8th gen, game engines started to employ dynamic lighting and shadowing effects rather than having those details as part of the texture work.
So when the games were back-ported to the 7th gen, they would cull the lighting and shadowing as the 7th gen hardware just wasn't capable enough, but some developers didn't go back to rework the textures to include those details in the texture maps to allow the 7th gen hardware to truly shine.

*****

I should have made myself a bit clearer. The base Xbox One game does look fine, when compared to other base Xbox One games... But I am pretty intolerant of anything sub-1080P, which the Xbox One spends the majority of it's time at... And often drops below even 900P. Ouch. That means the image is going to look very soft.
Rendering resolution is something I have always been vocal about, even during the 7th gen, this is nothing new.

And then you have the per-object motion blur which is a bit of a step down as well, which is an issue it shares with the Playstation 4 as well, but at a lower rendering resolution it takes a little bit of an extra hit.

In short, to me it looks like a dogs breakfast. - Thankfully the Playstation 4 Pro and Xbox One X resolves the bulk of those issues entirely, even if it doesn't manage a full fat 4k 100% of the time... But I guess that is why I am a PC gamer?