I’m curious for those of you that managed to get a Switch 2 - how are Switch 1 native games looking on the Switch 2 screen? Is it scaled? Does it look blurrier?
Good question - I’ve been very sad and spent most of the day testing backwards compatibility with older games as that was always a ? due to the move toward a translation layer/software emulation solution.
I’m pleased to report I found four third party games that always rendered in native 1080p in handheld mode, without a patch. We just had no idea because the Switch 1 screen was always 720p.
Ys Memoire Oath in Felghana
Ys Memoire in Celceta
Mad Rat Dead
Mary Skelter 2
Other titles output 720p but I’ve noticed games like Earth Defense Force 4.1, No More Heroes, SNK Heroines, and Tales of Vesperia now lock to 60fps either all the time or more often.
These 720p titles do indeed look blurrier though, but due to the higher base resolution it’s no where near as bad as DS games on 3DS. But titles with a low rendering resolution for their 3D graphics look rather bad, IMO.
Happy launch day all!
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Add The Last Remnant to the list of games that always output 1080p in handheld mode on Switch 1:
Now super crisp on Switch 2 handheld.
Edit: the Project Egg series of games (like arcade achives but for Japanese home computer software) all seem to output native 1080p in handheld mode on Switch 2.
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Hmm, so it might be worse for handheld play for any games that don’t get updated in some way.
I was wondering if they would essentially snap to docked mode by default on the translation layer, evidently not. I’ll keep the Switch Lite around anyway!
A substantial number of games run more smoothly on Switch 2 out of the box without patches. So there may be a trade off there of smoother frame rate vs cleaner pixel mapping.
And depending on how easy games are to patch, I wouldn’t be surprised if a substantial portion of the Switch 1 library got updates to display at 1080p on Switch 2 once as more studios get Switch 2 dev kits.
A lot of 1st party games have already been patched for free (including some as old as Switch’s launch year) and Nintendo never been known to put much effort into that in the past. So I imagine they made the process fairly straightforward so as not to be prohibitively difficult.
It’s also clear that Switch 2 portable mode is significantly more powerful than Switch 1’s docked mode. So there really shouldn’t be any hardware limitation to prevent every compatible game from getting at least a minor resolution bump in handled mode.
Of course, many studios won’t do it due to the additional QA involved. But that’s not due to hardware limitations.
I will keep my Switch 1 around, but only for the truly stubborn title that doesn’t work optimally on Switch 2. Otherwise, I really prefer playing on the new hardware.
A built in 4k nearest neighbor scaler for unpatched games in docked mode is also a nice bonus.