If you’ve been on the fence about upgrading to the Nintendo Switch 2 and are a big fan of the Pokemon franchise then Digital Foundry may have made your decision making a bit easier. Playing Pokemon Scarlet and Pokemon Violet sounds like a night and day change on Nintendo Switch 2 with better image quality, smoother framerate and better quality animations. While the game still isn’t perfect on Nintendo Switch 2, it’s as good as you’re going to get running on the newer hardware.
“The largest visual difference in Scarlet and Violet on Switch 2 lies in image quality. The original game ran between 720p and 1080p in docked mode, and about 576p to 720p portably, without anti-aliasing treatment of any kind.”
“The updated version benefits from clean, temporally-treated visuals in comparison, with a vastly more stable rendition of its world. The game looks genuinely quite solid now in image quality terms, and even holds up well on a 4K television set. Shimmering is mostly a thing of the past, and aliasing artifacts are generally absent, especially in still shots.”
“The actual resolution counts are still reasonably low, with a 1080p internal resolution for docked play (without DRS) scaled up to 4K and a ~648p figure for handheld play (with DRS) scaled up to 1080p. Both modes seem to use a relatively cheap form of DLSS in performance terms.”
“Switch 2 is a huge improvement in docked mode, aiming for and usually hitting a 60fps frame-rate target. There are relatively frequent dropped frames while traversing the open world though, little 33ms blips that pop up when traveling through certain areas.”
“In handheld mode you can expect a similar update, which counts to around 60fps in my offscreen testing with high frame-rate footage. You can still feel small frame-time spikes as you drive around the environment, but it’s generally fine.”
I’m going to give this a 2nd try once i get a Switch 2.
complains about not getting sequels on time…doesn’t get the console’s successor on time.
Not trying to speak for OP or anything, but not everyone can afford a brand new console on day 1. Don’t be a jerk when people choose to spend their money wisely.
Let me tell you i didnt play it on switch 1 (despite buying it) because it was pretty boring. now as part of being exited about the switch 2, I did try to give it a 2nd try on the switch 2 just yesterday. The game runs smooth, but it still has issues and performance issues. The camera often goes into the ground after a battle and we can see through it, NPCs still pop in and out (never saw that in the TOTK or BOTW for example), far away objects still look pretty bad and once you get closer its change is really sharp and pops to the eye, slow loading times (for example in battle when throwing a pokeball you seem to wait a second or two before throwing). Along with that I was surprised that shops in the town were simply a background with a menu (no shop interior), cant talk with all NPCs, ghost towns and no lore, weird animations, etc.
Overall it was a bad laggy game before and now its still a bad less buggy game.
As a really big pokemon fan (since gen 3) i just cant find myself enjoying it and ive tried…
BUT, I hope you will have fun either way :)
For everyone playing this – the memory leak still hasn’t been fixed. So if you’re playing long sessions make sure to close and reopen the game now and then otherwise you’ll start to see performance drops again.
The game may not be perfect as it should have been from the start instead of being rush due to its worse frame rates, glitches and animations. But, this could change next year for Pokémon’s 30th anniversary for Geb 10. I still love the game and the franchise through. c:
+1400h with this game. +35 years playing continuously. This game is amazing. The most of the sith throwed on it is simply lie. And Digital Foundry is and always has been a shady media that makes living by spreading falsehood and fabrications.
im not digital media and its ok for me to agree with stuff said in the media as ive experienced the game myself. For me its pure disappointment, and its fine. Im still glad you enjoy the game!
I’ll give this a 2nd try, only problem I had was the game would hard lock in certain towns and I couldn’t control the main protagonist. All i could do was navigate the menus or close the game.
What I love about them is their relatively simplistic analysis, almost amateurish… in any case, my husband would have liked to see what they would have said about the first PS2 games…
They’re still mid, even with a performance boost.
Still doesn’t fix all the awful bugs
It’s okay guys. We can all breathe a sigh of relief now that digital Foundry has told us…
God I hate those people.