Yacht Club Games, the talented developers behind Shovel Knight, have released a brand new update for the 2D platformer. The update now allows the game to output to 1080p when the game is docked. Previously it was only 720p when docked, so this is a more than welcome addition to an already stellar game.
Among other changes in today's 3.0A update on Switch:
Shovel Knight now outputs at a 1080p resolution while playing in docked mode.— Yacht Club Games (@YachtClubGames) March 30, 2017
I know it’s just a 2D “Retro” game but this does give hope that we could see games getting 1080p updates when devs get used to the Switch’s hardware, which shouldn’t be hard as the Tegra NX chip (Custom X1, includes new low power APIs and so on, making full use of the X1 A2 chip) is pretty easy to develop for.
I’ll eat my hat if I ever see any major developer doing much to improve their games once it’s out the door and in the customers hands.
P3. Nice. Anybody know how exactly this works? What did they have to do to make it display in a higher res?
Pretty much nothing, just scale it up. It’s retro 2D pixel look, cranking up the resolution is no issue there.
Well what I mean is physically what did they have to do? There must’ve been some kind of obstacle that prevented them from having this at launch. I’m only slightly familiar with coding and don’t know much about how grapihics output is configured.
They may have just forgotten to since there isn’t really a huge difference. Basically, the way it originally worked would be to render the game at whatever smaller resolution they used to simulate the look of the NES then used nearest neighbor scaling to 720p. From their, the Wii U, Switch, or your TV would use something like bicubic or bilinear filtering to size it to 720p. Now they would just be using nearest neighbor all the way up to 1080p which looks better. Only slightly better in this case though.
Just read the Twitter and it seems they did indeed forget. The Wii U version was already 1080p.
It’s rare any developer makes such a major adjustment after release. Good on Yacht Club.
I hope they’re outputting 1080p, cause if a simple game that is not demanding graphics-wise poses a performance problem, it would be very bad for the things to come.
Seems like more and more devs are OK just releasing games in 720p. It’s “easier” to downgrade than to optimize. I swear, 2010+ devs are real slackers with the word money being the only one in their mouth. They can afford it since machines get more powerful…
B-But the switch can only do 900!