My vote has to go to Rebellion North. Their ports of Sniper Elite 4, Zombie Army 4, and Strange Brigade are astonishingly close to the PS4 versions, with none of the low resolutions, blurry textures, or framerate drop normally seen in boundary-pushing Switch ports. Amazing stuff.

Runner up has to be Saber. The Crysis Remastered Trilogy are among the best looking games on Switch, and stuff like Witcher 3, World War Z, and Kingdom Come have no business running on a 2015 mobile chipset, yet Saber made it happen.

I know it didn't come from one of the porting specialists listed above, but a special shout-out goes out to Unknown Worlds Entertainment for the Subnautica + Subnautica: Below Zero double pack for not only being an excellent port, but for getting both games on one cart with no BS mandatory downloads.

I feel like the game being all on the cart or not is more down to the publisher, not the porting studio.

A dev like Panic Button or Saber can shrink down the file size as much as they can, but ultimately it's the publisher who chooses whether they want to shell out for a bigger cart or cheap out and go with a smaller one and a mandatory download.

I understand why people are choosing Panic Button. The work they did with those games is great. But, if you recall, almost all of those (or maybe all of them) are 60FPS on Xbox One and PS4. Which means just cutting the framerate in half like they did already gave them a significant amount of room to play around with.

Saber Interactive? Well, not only does The Witcher 3 look pretty good for the platform (albeit at a low resolution), but it was 30FPS on PS4 and Xbox One, and not a steady one at that. In addition, it's an open world title, the exact type of title that the Switch's hardware is worst at. Kingdom Come Deliverance is another one that they ported, which that game was also not a steady 30FPS on PS4 and I believe only ran at 900p. Just super impressive they were able to put that on Switch.

Finally, go take a look at Crisis on PS3/360 and then Switch. Yes it's a remaster with newer technology, but the fact remains that it's a significant improvement AND they even implemented SVOGI. Which basically voxel-based ray tracing.

Fair point, but don't undersell how much work it would still take to shrink assets down enough to fit on whatever size carts they've been given to work with. I'd imagine that the balancing act of trying to hit a certain resolution and graphical target while keeping a file size under a certain limit isn't easy. It might not be their original games, but they still take pride in their work and want it to look as good and be as close to the original vision as they can get it.

Oh absolutely, I didn't mean to diminish the work of the devs in reducing file size without ruining the game's quality.

Sniper Elite 4 for instance is 35GB on PS4 but just 6GB on Switch while still looking remarkably similar.

Witcher 3 is the port I was happiest with—and it’s not even close. So I went with Saber.

If by impressive just most demanding game then yeah Panic Button. Impressive how accurate the game is to its original hardware with the least input delay or issues for older games. M2 as always. City Connection has had trouble with input lag in their Saturn tributes. Maybe because they are using an actual Saturn EMU on Switch. Dunno.  M2's work knows no equal for older titles.

I am going to go with Saber. When you look at there list of games and the high quality of ports they put out, they truly did fantastic work. arguably better than the other studios.

Panic Button is the flashy other studio that I could have voted for. Which they did some fantastic ports of there games. But when i compare there titles to the ones that Saber did, Saber did a more technically advance port with great results. Panic Button made great ports of a lot more linear games.

Special shout out to Rebellion North, they are not one that is mention much, but they made fantastic Switch ports of there games.

Yeah Panic Button did some great ports, but I feel like Saber's were more ambitious.

PB seem to have moved on, their last Switch port was Apex Legends in 2021, while Saber's still at it, having released a port of Biomutant just in the time since I posted this thread.

I wonder if Shiver could become a contender in the future; so far they've done three major Switch ports, the excellent Mortal Kombat 11, the rough Mortal Kombat 1 (it's better now than at launch, but still rough) and the wildly ambitious Hogwarts Legacy which took a big hit visually but as a PS5 title is a miracle in that it runs at all.