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Digital Foundry: Hands-on with Switch's 'impossible' Doom port

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  • Digital Foundry: Hands-on with Switch's 'impossible' Doom port

    Just how powerful is Nintendo Switch and what are its limits? From Digital Foundry's perspective, it's been fun - and fascinating - to see the evolution of the platform, our expectations of the core Tegra X1 processor's capabilities exceeded by several key releases. But a Switch conversion of the Doom 2016 reboot? That's on a whole new level, and we had to check it out. We went hands-on with the game for about 40 minutes last week, our key question being: just how did they do that?
    There are cutbacks and compromises of course, and to be clear, one in particular is going to sting. id's intention with the title was to recreate the best-looking 60Hz console shooter and on Switch, that isn't the case, with the experience pared back to half-refresh. Our session with the game was entirely in handheld mode and it still played well, with a mostly consistent frame-rate smoothed over with the same post-process motion blur found in the original. 30fps though? It's a reduction in fidelity that many won't be able to get past - but of course, it's what makes this port possible in the first place.
    Bearing in mind that our observations are limited to handheld play, along with just 25 seconds of capture shown in last week's Nintendo Direct (curiously, the Japanese broadcast had some extra footage), this preview can't be exhaustive or definitive. However, there are some basic observations here: firstly, resolution is low - possibly very low. Harsh saw-tooth edges are smoothed off with what we suspect is the 8x temporal super-sampling anti-aliasing used in the original game. Doom was always soft but the Switch rendition is its blurriest presentation yet. We can't be entirely certain, but some areas of gameplay are blurrier than others, suggesting dynamic resolution scaling - a feature in place on all console versions to date.
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