The 2015 open world zombie survival game Dying Light is coming to Nintendo Switch this week under the “Platinum Edition” mantra, and Digital Foundry has received exclusive early access to perform their usual analysis. Overall, they considered it to be “an intelligently designed, impressive port,” and praised its visual quality in handheld mode, especially on the OLED display.
In terms of framerate, the port runs uncapped, typically bouncing between 30-36fps, which creates a “slightly jerky look to the action.” There are also occasions, notably in the city at night, where the framerate will dip below 30fps. Dying Light’s developer Techland has confirmed that a patch is in the works to help with these issues however, so hopefully the game will run much smoother post-launch.
As for resolution, although technically running at 1080p docked and 720p in handheld mode, there is a bit more going on under the hood than just that;
“Techland is using what seems to be a new TAAU feature – temporal anti-aliasing with upscaling. The idea here is to reconstruct the image over several frames to match the target output resolution: either 1080p in docked or 720p in portable. Naturally, the actual base resolution is lower, often counting around or below 720p in docked mode, but the result is interesting: it looks reasonably close to native when standing still but as you move, you’ll notice some image break-up.”
Make sure to check out Digital Foundry’s full YouTube video below for a more in-depth technical analysis. Dying Light: Platinum Edition launches for Switch physically and digitally on 19th October.