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.”
