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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Digital Foundry: Best graphics on Nintendo Switch

zeldaring said:

The only one frustrated is permalite, and what does it matter if the final results are superb, and among the best looking games on switch. let's use a example crysis 3, if the the 360 port of the game was 60fps/900p that would not be using switch capablites? it would by far switch's techically most impressive game, same for rdr 1080p/60fps i think we should worry more about the final results then say's it's using poor man's GI that most people won't even notice.

Please don't make blatant and false allegations. - I am not "frustrated".

Again. Red Dead Redemption has a clean presentation, but it's using last-generation visual feature sets. It's not pushing "graphics".

Crysis 3 is doing more, CryEngine is a very flexible and scalable engine... Which is why us PC gamers love that game engine.

zeldaring said:

Ok explain to me why xenoblade 3 being mentioned? it even lacks features that were basic during the 360 era, like dynamic shadows and for a open world game that's one of the most important graphical feature, and it just looks like crap over all, and most likely when DF makes best looking thirdparty games they might mention RDR and crysis 3 then what. RDR looks a switch game while xenoblade 3 looks like a early ps3 game. 

Switch's advanced graphical features could come at cost, like lower resolution, less stable framerate so there are tade offs. again BOTW is on wiiu its not using switch's advanced feature set , so does that not count as well? how about mario rpg which looks like a small indi game. What about mario wonder, it's not using those advanced graphical features but still mentioned why aren't you not questioning why DF mentioned it. like i said it's all bout someone not accepting being wrong,

Xenoblade 3 is using a ton of stylized visuals... But you are also forgetting something.
Scale. Xenoblade has more.
And yes... Red Dead has a "ton" of vegetation, but keep in mind how that vegetation is actually rendered, it's essentially 2D pictures stuck together in various directions to simulate complexity.

Also... The WiiU and Switch share more hardware similarities than the Xbox 360 and Switch.
More modern Radeon architecture with compute makes a helluva difference... Which is why Breath of the Wild translated over so well.

h2ohno said:

In my opinion, the best-looking 7th gen open world game ported to Switch is Assassin's Creed Black Flag because its environments, the foliage especially, is much better. I find the grass in RDR to be really low quality, and in the 2 comparison pics that are constantly thrown about in this thread, the Xenoblade 1 looks much, much better than the RDR right above it to my eyes, both in terms of art and in looking like a more modern game.

Need to give a nod to Metro, it's turning some brilliant results for a 7th gen title.

zeldaring said:

Am I supposed to know every single game that using some advanced feature I usually just watch the games that have the features and actually look nextgen. For the most part the game are really low resolution. 

If you wish to be informed... Then yes.

zeldaring said:

Oh man i just connnected  my laptop to the TV 42 inch to play botw and red dead. I'm shocked how bad they looked compared to my 14 inch laptop, on my laptop red dead looked stunning like real life and zelda BOTW like a painting. on the 42 inch they both looked dated and ugly, did not expect that. I can't even imagine what 540p would look like.

Breath of the Wild is 900P and Red Dead is 1080P when docked.
To say it's "dated and ugly" is a lie when comparing them both on the Switch.

Breath of the Wild scales up on big panels really well thanks to it's stylized visuals.

However... And again, it baffles me that I need to reinforce this intrinsic fact...

The impact of resolution is entirely determined by panel size and the viewing distance from the display, at a certain distance you will not be able to discern the difference between 900P and 1080P on a 42" panel.

Again, just resolution alone is a useless metric... Especially in the era of temporal up-scaling.

curl-6 said:

It's not the sharpest looking game on Switch, but it's a lot better than just "540p" alone might suggest. Raw pixel counts aren't as telling as they once were now that we live in the age of DLSS, FSR, and other reconstruction methods.

That and not everything in a games world is rendered at the output resolution anyway.

A game that outputs at 720P with 720P shadow resolution will have better looking shadows than a 1080P output and quarter-resolution shadows. Aka 540P, the shadows will look more blocky and aliased on the 1080P output.

It's the same issue with "bits" and "gflops". - People see a number and automagically assume bigger is better, which is often the case, but not always.

The Switch also has an OLED variant which looks positively brilliant in games designed to leverage those high contrasts and inky black levels.



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zeldaring said:
curl-6 said:

And that's fine, you are allowed to think Xenoblade 3 or Pikmin 4 or Monster Hunter don't look impressive. Nobody has a problem with you having an opinion. But this is the third or fourth thread in the last week or so where you've spent pages and pages spinning Nintendo things negatively. 

I don't think having a discussion is being negative. I just believe multiplatforms will show the superior hardware just like switch showed it right away even in though in handheld which is not a big step up power wise but modern architecture really showed right of the bat.

There's nothing wrong with having, or wanting to participate in, a discussion. But I think there comes a point where no new thoughts are being made, and discussion is just in a loop and not being advanced anymore. 



You'd think Xenoblade was made by Gamefreak and not Monoliftsoft the way it's talked about.

I do think that there are sometimes more advanced games that look worse than less advanced games. Bayonetta 2 looks way, way better than Bayonetta 3 in my opinion, even knowing that 3 is a more advanced game built for more advanced hardware. The ambition of Bayonetta 3 was simply too much for the Switch, so the extra horsepower went into places other than having better textures and higher fidelity character models. I recently saw a discussion of Star Wars games where the Youtuber claimed that the ship models in Rogue Squadron 3 were worse than the models in Rogue Squadron 2 because that was the only way the game's greater ambition would work on the same hardware. The Mario and Rabbids games are possibly another example.



curl-6 said:
Chrkeller said:

That helps, but DLSS at 540p is still rough.  I get there are things that can be done, but 540p is still messy.  

It's not the sharpest looking game on Switch, but it's a lot better than just "540p" alone might suggest. Raw pixel counts aren't as telling as they once were now that we live in the age of DLSS, FSR, and other reconstruction methods.

And from personal experience I can tell you reconstruction methods are not as great as people make them out to be.  It is an AI model.  The more data input, the better the output.  Reconstruction works amazing with 1440p (loads in input) to 4k.  540p is meh, at best.  

Don't get me wrong, I love the Switch.  Outside PC it is my favorite device.  But low resolution of the switch is very perceptible.  I am hoping the S2 can hit 1080p native, because than AI modelling will work well.  



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Leynos said:

I believe it uses FSR

Which is worse than DLSS and DLSS doesn't work great with low resolutions.  



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Chrkeller said:
curl-6 said:

It's not the sharpest looking game on Switch, but it's a lot better than just "540p" alone might suggest. Raw pixel counts aren't as telling as they once were now that we live in the age of DLSS, FSR, and other reconstruction methods.

And from personal experience I can tell you reconstruction methods are not as great as people make them out to be.  It is an AI model.  The more data input, the better the output.  Reconstruction works amazing with 1440p (loads in input) to 4k.  540p is meh, at best.  

Don't get me wrong, I love the Switch.  Outside PC it is my favorite device.  But low resolution of the switch is very perceptible.  I am hoping the S2 can hit 1080p native, because than AI modelling will work well.  

I have played through the entirety of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 in docked mode, I am very familiar with how it looks and so from personal experience I can tell you it doesn't look anything like a straight 540p. 



Leynos said:

I believe it uses FSR

Tears of the Kingdom uses FSR; Xenoblade Chronicles 3 uses a custom in-house solution.



curl-6 said:
Chrkeller said:

And from personal experience I can tell you reconstruction methods are not as great as people make them out to be.  It is an AI model.  The more data input, the better the output.  Reconstruction works amazing with 1440p (loads in input) to 4k.  540p is meh, at best.  

Don't get me wrong, I love the Switch.  Outside PC it is my favorite device.  But low resolution of the switch is very perceptible.  I am hoping the S2 can hit 1080p native, because than AI modelling will work well.  

I have played through the entirety of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 in docked mode, I am very familiar with how it looks and so from personal experience I can tell you it doesn't look anything like a straight 540p. 

You can say whatever you want.  I've played 50+ switch games docked..  they are low resolution, and it shows on the big screen.

Sure they are all playable and many of them are some of the best games ever created. 

Pikmin 4 moving between 720p and 820p on a 55 inch screen is blurry.  1080p is starting to be meh on large screens.  But the good news is 1080p reconstruction to 1440p should work well for the S2.    



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Chrkeller said:
curl-6 said:

I have played through the entirety of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 in docked mode, I am very familiar with how it looks and so from personal experience I can tell you it doesn't look anything like a straight 540p. 

You can say whatever you want.  I've played 50+ switch games docked..  they are low resolution, and it shows on the big screen.

Sure they are all playable and many of them are some of the best games ever created. 

Pikmin 4 moving between 720p and 820p on a 55 inch screen is blurry.  1080p is starting to be meh on large screens.  But the good news is 1080p reconstruction to 1440p should work well for the S2.    

If everything on Switch automatically looks bad to you, then you're entitled to that opinion, but in that case do you actually have anything constructive to add to this thread, or are you just here to further derail discussion?



curl-6 said:
Chrkeller said:

You can say whatever you want.  I've played 50+ switch games docked..  they are low resolution, and it shows on the big screen.

Sure they are all playable and many of them are some of the best games ever created. 

Pikmin 4 moving between 720p and 820p on a 55 inch screen is blurry.  1080p is starting to be meh on large screens.  But the good news is 1080p reconstruction to 1440p should work well for the S2.    

If everything on Switch automatically looks bad to you, then you're entitled to that opinion, but in that case do you actually have anything constructive to add to this thread, or are you just here to further derail discussion?

Just giving my opinion, no different than you. 

And I didn't say it looked bad, I said switch games are clearly low resolution....  and they are.  Facts are facts.  

I think one of the reasons LM3 looks good is it targets 1080p.  I didn't see it drop to lower resolutions like a lot of the bigger switch games.  

Edit

And I am hoping Nintendo does something cool with the S2, like upscaling switch games to 4k.  That would be nice.  It can't be that hard.  I emulate ps2 games at 4k and it really does wonders.  



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