[DF] Pokémon Scarlet & Violet: Switch 2 Delivers Dramatic Improvements Over Awful Switch 1 Performance

Topher

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Switch 2 revitalises Pokémon Scarlet and Violet with better performance and image quality


A technical disaster on the original Switch is dramatically transformed.


Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, Game Freak's 2022 mainline Pokémon games, had infamously poor visuals. Rudimentary lighting, low-res textures and stiff animation afflicted these open-world efforts, while performance dropped below the 30fps target nearly constantly and image quality also suffered. Technically, they were a failure by any reasonable standard, even on the power-constrained OG Switch console. Now the Switch 2 is here and these games have the potential to run significantly better - but what changes does the free Switch 2 upgrade Nintendo is offering actually deliver?

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. That wouldn't be too offensive-looking necessarily for a game with a relatively small scale, but for an open world with vast views and plenty of ultra-fine details to resolve, it was a nightmare scenario. 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, based on characteristic image breakup on moving objects we've observed in other Switch 2 titles like Fast Fusion. That means image quality can dip in more challenging scenes, but given the relatively sedate pace of Pokémon, it still marks a huge improvement in final image quality, especially in the sharper docked mode.

The other obvious visual improvement comes down to frame-rate. Violet's Switch 1 incarnation was an infamously poor performer, often hanging in the mid-20s during open-world exploration. Cutscenes often ran even worse, and the game would occasionally hang with a long frame-time spike. I've seen worse performers on Switch, but the combination of crude visuals and poor frame-rates in a Switch-exclusive game was exceptional.

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. This is obviously far preferable to the original Switch's performance profile, but it's a little bit disappointing that the deployment of the advanced T239 processor can't bring the game to a solid 60. There are occasional dips elsewhere as well, like with certain combat moves in battle.

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.

The game's animation update rates have also been greatly improved. On Switch 1, distant characters and objects often ran with heavily decimated animation - eg a distant windmill might update twice a second. Getting closer gradually increased the update rate, though the structure only updated at full rate with the rest of the game once you were extremely close, only a few metres away. Characters were badly affected as well, producing some pretty incredible results.

Switch 2 appears to be completely liberated from this issue. At any distance, you seem to see full update animation, an improvement that likely depends on the Switch 2's greatly upgraded CPU. We also spotted more monsters spawning in while walking or driving through matched areas on Switch 2, which is good for collectors and perhaps a bit more annoying for anyone just trying to traverse.

Finally, loading times are much faster. Fast travelling around the world took a fair bit of time on Switch 1, but on Switch 2 we get up to a 4.4x speed-up, with travel loads lasting just a few seconds. Loading times in general seem greatly improved on Nintendo's new console, which is great to see.

There are a lot of elements, however, that haven't been upgraded for Switch 2. Draw distances and pop-in are generally the same across both platforms, for instance. Pokémon also still aren't persistent after they leave a certain radius from the player, which doesn't really match player expectations for open-world gaming. Low-res shadow maps remain, though shadow filtering looks a touch more refined, and texture resolution also appears unchanged, with low-res examples and crude normal maps visible at close range and artificial-looking tiling scenery at distance. Distant textures do at least resolve with higher resolution mipmaps, so there's greater texture detail at a distance, even if the base asset is identical.

Elsewhere on the no-change list, there have been no upgrades to the aliased and low-res full-screen stills that are used occasionally during cutscenes, nor have the pre-rendered videos been touched. The games doesn't support HDR at all either, though this is more understandable given that it wasn't authored to do so. The game's underlying visual tech is still poor in places: there's no SSAO, indirect lighting quality is poor, animations are stiff and awkward, and models appear basic and low-fidelity.

There are a few nice touches, like the Zelda-style grass, but the game generally still resembles an early Xbox 360 or PS3 title. The original Switch wasn't the most powerful hardware around by any means, but it could still pull off visually impressive and artistically sound open-world efforts that ran at reasonable frame-rates, and it's a shame that such a long-running franchise wasn't allowed sufficient development time and resources to achieve the same. Game Freak's graphics techniques and engine technology ultimately haven't kept pace with the transition to HD consoles. The engine used for these mainline Pokemon titles does not seem well-suited to delivering a credible open-world game with modern fidelity, given its current gameplay and graphical limitations in the Pokémon games.

The Switch 2 offers enough power to blast past some of the game's technical issues on the original Switch unit, however. Image quality and frame-rate concerns have largely been ameliorated by the faster hardware, producing a decent rendition of Scarlet and Violet. There's no doubt that it's a huge visual upgrade, though it's arguably not enough to produce a visually satisfying version of the game. Scarlet and Violet are massively enhanced on Switch 2, even if the visuals are still uninspiring. Pokémon fans would be well-advised to check this one out.

 
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eHj8E6WgHOClMuGi.jpg

What Is That Kojima Productions GIF by Xbox
 
Looks like Switch 2 is using dlss performance most likely judging by the artifacting going on

If true switch 2 is really just a switch pro, not really a generational upgrade
 
Looks like Switch 2 is using dlss performance most likely judging by the artifacting going on

If true switch 2 is really just a switch pro, not really a generational upgrade

yeah 7x GPU power is not a generational leap.
breaking news, the PS5 is just a PS4 Pro Pro

No Brain Idiot GIF
 
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The game visual/art direction/story is out of the salvation, but is a welcome performance update.

I don't think was Game Freak doing this update at all taking into account their incompetence.

This is probably Xenoblade devs doing miracles as usual. Good stuff.
 
Looks like Switch 2 is using dlss performance most likely judging by the artifacting going on

If true switch 2 is really just a switch pro, not really a generational upgrade
nah-shaking-my-head.gif

It's a new gen.
This is basically BC.
 
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Looks like Switch 2 is using dlss performance most likely judging by the artifacting going on

If true switch 2 is really just a switch pro, not really a generational upgrade
It's indescribably more powerful, even with the somewhat shit CPU we ended up with. These are last gen releases, were you disappointed when TLOU2 Remaster could barely hit 1440p 60 fps on PS5 from a 1080p/30 release baseline?
 
yeah 7x GPU power is not a generational leap.
breaking news, the PS5 is just a PS4 Pro Pro

No Brain Idiot GIF
Season 5 Nbc GIF by The Office

It becomes more obvious the more you parse his post. Let's take a look at the tape:

"Looks like Switch 2 is using dlss performance most likely judging by the artifacting going on

If true switch 2 is really just a switch pro, not really a generational upgrade
"

shocked holy shit GIF
 
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It's indescribably more powerful, even with the somewhat shit CPU we ended up with. These are last gen releases, were you disappointed when TLOU2 Remaster could barely hit 1440p 60 fps on PS5 from a 1080p/30 release baseline?
60>30 Switch 2 is going to struggle with that from 3rd party games
 
A visual and resolution boost still doesn't save this game from being boring as fuck.

Not only boring, but it also has some ludicrous design choices (the map is worthless!)

I wouldn't recommend this game to my worst enemy.
 

And there were some autistic people thinking the problem was Switch.
No, Switch 2 can only brute force this crap. The rest is up to the imcopetents at Gamefreak. Its a terrible game in term of design, optimization and presentation, everything its just ugly. Having a better hardware will not save this pile of garbage.
I doubt they even did this without help and even willing, since it was free and they probably wanted to charge the same way Legends gonna be charged.
 
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If they can't do 3D they should bring back the classic Sprites, S/V are dog water.
Or they should reduce the scope of their games and the amount of them.

This is not Switch fault, nor Nintendo or even TPC scheduling fault.

Game Freak decided to release to Pokemon games one after the other, the second one being technically subpar already, then decided to go open world for the next one... I think the painting in the wall was VERY clear, they should have worked smarter instead of pumping production to insane and leaving it in god's hands.
 
yeah 7x GPU power is not a generational leap.
breaking news, the PS5 is just a PS4 Pro Pro

No Brain Idiot GIF
Funnily enough, there's a bigger gap between Switch 1 and Switch 2 than between PS4 base and PS5 in GPU alone (in I/O it's way bigger and CPU is around the same imo)
 
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Still embarrassingly bad. I would never be caught playing a game that looks like… that.

I'm not even dismissing the whole franchise, the other Pokemon games might also be technical nightmares but they at least have good art styles. Legends looks good(ish), at least in terms of art. But these games just look ugly, amateurish, and unfinished. Even with the updates, there were several times in that video that I cringed.

If you're interested in playing a Pokémon game, play Legends. It's actually good. These games are… not so much.
 
Funnily enough, there's a bigger gap between Switch 1 and Switch 2 than between PS4 base and PS5 in GPU alone (in I/O it's way bigger and CPU is around the same imo)
Actually, no. On paper ? you can make up anything.

On improvements alone without DLSS ? some games got 8x performance (res + FPS) improvement from PS4 to PS5.

And CPU not sure too. PS5 CPU is about 3.5x faster than PS4 CPU.
 
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Actually, no. On paper ? you can make up anything.

On improvements alone without DLSS ? some games got 8x performance (res + FPS) improvement from PS4 to PS5.

And CPU not sure too. PS5 CPU is about 3.5x faster than PS4 CPU.
Switch 2 takes Tears of the Kingdom from 720p to 1440p, and the FPS from 30 to 60. Dragon Quest Builders 2 can see a 3x increase in CPU performance and that game has no Switch 2 patch, which likely means it is not using more than the 3 cores of the original.

So the leap in performance is similar to the PS4-PS5. Although the RAM increase was even larger, that was a 3x increase. On the other hand PS5 had a larger leap in I/O speeds.

Seems comparable.
 
barring the one image everyone is clowning.. this is a pretty insane difference. Being able to brute force this mess of a game to run and look that much better says alot about its capabilities.
 
Having played Violet before on Switch 1 the upgrade looks really significant, the game would often drop below 20 fps in towns.

But I think Pokemon games aren't gonna be the best way to benchmark Switch 2 performance, that would be like using Elden Ring to compare home consoles.
 
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