Tweet
We've had a lot of requests for this over the last few months, and having finally sampled WWE 2K18, we can see why. The Switch port has built up quite a reputation since its release in early December last year - in fact, many believe it's the worst game available for the system. There've been reports of terrible performance and game-breaking slowdown, but the game was patched recently, so we thought we'd dip in to see whether there's been any improvement. First impressions suggest not, and out of all the multi-platform Switch titles we've experienced, this is easily the worst port we've tested.And it is indeed a pretty basic port by nature, as opposed to a bespoke project tailored to Nintendo's hardware. WWE 2K18 is a multi-platform release so in assessing the Switch version we felt it was important to put it into context. The standard Xbox One is the next machine up the console power ladder, and in comparing the two, it's fairly clear how the Switch game was nipped and tucked. There are the basics: a 60fps target frame-rate drops down to half that on Nintendo's hybrid. And of course, there's resolution too. Both versions tested use dynamic resolution scaling, so a 720p-900p range on the Microsoft machine drops down to 540p-720p in docked mode on Switch (we've have like to have tested the portable config, but mysteriously, the developer disables the system level screenshot function).
So essentially we're looking at around 50-60 per cent of the resolution and a maximum 50 per cent of the frame-rate in transitioning down from Xbox to Switch, but the developers still aren't done. Switch is shy a couple of gigs in terms of available memory so texture quality is downgraded, and some of the most compute and bandwidth-intensive passes in the renderer are strategically shaved: general shading quality is lower, with ambient occlusion and shadow quality in particular pared back tremendously. To give the game its due though, geometry is pretty close between both versions.
Read more…
More...