LA Noire's Switch port tested: could the system handle GTA5?

[Administrator]

The LA Noire remaster is available on PS4, Xbox One and their 4K mid-gen refresh equivalents, but the real story here is the Switch port and the fact that it's the first time we've seen an open word game of this type running on Nintendo's hybrid system. It's also Rockstar's debut title for the console, and we can only wonder what else the publisher has cooking for the system. Could the Grand Theft Auto games be in development for Switch? Is it even possible to successfully port those titles? The LA Noire conversion doesn't have all the answers, but it convincingly reveals some of the challenges any prospective GTA conversion might face.
As things stand, the original LA Noire was built on a custom engine designed with PlayStation 3's Cell processor in mind, and this version was the preferred console edition back in the day. It was quite a sight: PS3 managed to run a massive open-world built around an impressive facsimile of Los Angeles, with fully functioning day-night cycles, weather, physics, wandering NPCs and traffic systems. All this meant a heavy reliance on the machine's unique synergistic processing units - SPUs - and the end result is that the Switch version, reliant on just three available ARM CPU cores operating at 1GHz, can suffer from some obvious drawbacks.
But let's start with the good news. On Switch, you get a fully playable version of LA Noire, with a large, detailed world to explore - unlike anything we've seen before on a handheld. Surprisingly, this also renders at 1920x1080 when connected to a TV via docking - much like the base PS4 release, in fact. However, a dynamic resolution technique is in play, meaning Switch scales the pixel output based on rendering load - and at stress points that means a low point of 1440x1080. In other words, the game lowers its resolution on the horizontal axis alone, and faced with a busy street, it drops to 75 per cent of the full pixel-count overall. Still, even at 1440x1080, Switch is still resolving far more detail than PS3's native 1280x720.
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