Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Runs At 60fps In 1080p When Docked

That's good news

Let's hope the framerate holds.

And I wish I could opt for 720p at 60 frames for 3+ player splitscreen. I definitely prefer framerate over resolution, especially since each area of the split screen is so small that you can't notice a resolution difference, anyway.

That is excellent news!

Nice, the only other thing I can imagine would make MK8 look better is some anti-aliasing, but even without it the game already looks great on Wii U.

30fps looks like rubbish in 3/4 player 🙄

Oh well. I'm likely not getting it anyway

That's very good performance. The Wii U had 2 screens to deal with.

We've known it would be 1080 when docked since the game was announced.

"no details have been divulged about how the game will run when played in portable mode,we could see an increase in three and four player frame rate performance as the game will be rendered at 720p when played as a handheld title."

Who is really going to play 3 or 4 player in tabletop mode?

@SLIGEACH_EIRE

It had almost nothing on the second screen though.

@thesilverbrick tbh the lower resolution might not be enough to get 60 fps so that's probably why they stick with 1080p 30fps

There is a big difference going from 720p to 1080p in games. I'm getting Mario Kart 8 Deluxe as the graphics in MK8D deserve it (passed 100% on MK8 with all DLC).

Shinen does what Nintendon't.

Couldn't resist.

That drop is going to be very noticeable when more than 2 people are playing. Curious if Fast RMX has a similar drop for local multiplayer.

@Dezzy No true. You could play on the gamepad. The same view admittedly but it's still taxing on the system and you could do it on the fly. You could also toggle between the course map and the horn.

@thesilverbrick
I feel slightly opposite. When I'm just one player, I don't need 1080p, but for 4-player split screen, the extra resolution would really come in handy, so you can tell what is going on.

Of course, with the intense action, framerate is still king, but then I'd rather they started removing certain backdrop elements and effects, and toggled off reflections entirely, as those things are of less importance altogether.

@SLIGEACH_EIRE

Transmitting the regular camera view to the gamepad was almost definitely a capability that was built into the hardware. Not something that was re-rendered.

@Dezzy
The separate cameras for other players were most likely not rendered twice, but the one player using the GamePad could play in full 720p while the others had to watch four smaller screens on the TV, including one representing the GamePad user. So there might have been some double rendering there.

You're probably right that not a lot of performance was every really sacrificed on that account. The chipset responsible for compressing and transmitting the image data for the GamePad was strictly reserved for this job at all times anyway.

I wonder if it's truly 60FPS this time, or 59.xx like MK8 on the Wii U was. (not that people noticed in practice)

@Pod
The gamepad is 480 res. Wouldn't be 720 output for 1 player.

@Dezzy you talking about the wii u or the switch? huge difference there!

@123akis : That won't affect the resolution or frame rate as additional images are not being rendered by the same console. The Switches are only exchanging input data.

@thesilverbrick I think developers in general should make their games like Nioh in where they give players the option for performance. In that game you can choose high fidelity with average fps or average fidelity with 60fps. They also have the half and half option which is not very good. Every game should have this ability for those of us that really don't care about graphics and prefer smooth experiences.

The game was absolutely gorgeous on the Wii U, can't wait to see a comparison.

@Dezzy
Ah, you are of course right.

I guess my point was just that the resolution on the GamePad was higher than the screen for the same player displayed on the TV.

The individual screens on the TV would be no higher than 360x640, but maybe the screen on the GamePad actually has a frame that matches that to the 480p resolution, avoiding any double rendering altogether. I don't exactly remember what it looks like.

@Pod

They'll either have just rendered P1 at the gamepad resolution and downscaled on the TV, or just upscaled the 360p to fit the gamepad!

Cool! That's good to know, but I'll enjoy it regardless.

Whoah! I assumed that Mario Kart 8 on Wii U was running at 1080p. It's so beautiful!

@Dezzy
None of those two ever appeared to be the case to me, but I may be wrong.

"run at 60fps at 1080p" ... well, its a Wii U game...

As long as these 30 frames are keyed properly, this is not an issue.
Im generally more interested, if the two player online mode has any issues in that regard, having more than 2 people on one console is sadly rather unlikely these days (Becoming an adult was the worst decision ever )

I think the commercial about 4 players mode in 60fps 1080p just edited.
In reality, frame rate drops to 30 fps when 3 / 4 players joined. Same like Wii U.

This was announced at the unveiling of the game, but it's still awesome to see it again.

Game looks so good.
5 New battle modes with 8 new arenas (some with anti gravity), can break while drifting, 2 new characters, feather and ghost return, can hold 2 items, optional steering assist, 48 total tracks and 42 characters...

The base game was easily a 9/10. With all this content I'd think the game will be about as close to perfect you could get for a cart racer.

game still looks amazing

1080P/30fps in multiplayer? What a waste. It's a racing game. If you have to make anything dip, have it be the resolution.

I assume this just applies to local multiplayer, right?

@Dakt
You just may be right about that.

@Ralizah 4 player with a 960x540 window per player or 4 player with a 640x360 window per player, that's quite a big difference.

And even if they dropped to 720, there's no guarantee it would maintain 60fps in 3/4 player. It could well be a CPU limitation rather than GPU...

@JaxonH hoping for another perfect 10 - exclusive to Switch!

Hmm. Could they have done 720p60 for 4-player instead? I'd have preferred that (especially since my TV is 720p, anyway). Well, it's moot at this point.

They just need to add a little of Anti Aliasing! AA x4 and it would look better

this was only 720p on Wii U? WOW. I mean that game was beautiful I would never have known.

Should be early in april, to keep the flow of games a bit better. That said I don't know if I will double dip on this game yet.

Well the Switch screen is 720p so thinking any games will run any higher is just foolish. As a matter of fact the switch can probably run 4 player split undocked at 60fps because of being 720p

@SLIGEACH_EIRE The Wii U was a pile of hot garbage

@OorWullie ..ants

Oh well. It probably couldn't have lowered resolution on the run when taking in a third player?

Also, still no anti-aliasing, am I right? The game looks like a horrible mess of pixels without that. They should include the least power-demanding one, it'd be so much better.

It may be limited to two players, but being able to maintain 60 fps on split screen at all sounds quite impressive when the toll on framerate and performance in general in the HD era was allegedly what made split screen multiplayer scarcer in games to begin with.

Wasn't it already confirmed in the latest video you can only play two player split screen when undocked? So I'd expect 60fps at 720p and maybe 30fps when split two player.

@Skunkfish OK, so just split-screen local multiplayer. At least I'll never have to worry about dealing with this limitation.

@SLIGEACH_EIRE actually playing on the second screen wasn't taxing. You are aware that while the Wii U did all the major graphical grunt, the gamepad had its own processor to deal with some of the workload, right?? RIGHT?? And that the transferring of video from Wii U to gamepad was all hardware based so didn't actually alter performance?

So what's your point? The Wii U gamepad didn't alter performance and the Switch version runs better on Better hardware. Is that it?

I didn't even know the games ran at 1080! I was wondering why Zelda looked so damn good. Nice surprise P:

Fast Rmx also runs at 60fps in 3-4 players docked & 2 player undocked. Mario Kart 8 shouldn't do worse. 30 fps in racing games are unplayable.

Sweet!

The release of this game will be like a 2nd launch. The Wii U sold poorly, so theres a ton of gamers who missed out. I can't wait!

No other AAA devs make splitscreen games anymore, let alone ones of a comparable quality.

1080/30 is better than 720/60 for splitscreen. More screen detail per player, yknow?

(but we could see an increase in three and four player frame rate performance as the game will be rendered at 720p when played as a handheld title.)

The TX1 is under-clocked as it is in console mode, but going into portable mode it's further under-clocked so the 720p resolution isn't going to give you more performance.

@thesilverbrick I would argue that the resolution matters more when you are using a smaller portion of the screen in 3 and 4 player mode, actually. The option would be nice either way.

@NiBar No offense to Fast RMX but Mario Kart 8 looks way better and is doing way more. So... it would be great if it could run better but I'm not buying that it "should".

@Skunkfish It was only a few years ago that I realized we used to each get a 180x120p screen in 4 player n64 games. And that was through an RF connection or maybe composite when we got a nicer tv. I think that might be worse than Gameboy resolution. And on the times we were hooked up to a 13" TV/VCR combo, not much bigger either. Probably appears smaller from the distance you end up sitting away from the screen. Plus that Goldeneye framerate. LOL.

@TheWhiteFalcon 59.99FPS was clearly a bug on release that was actually fixed in a later patch.

@OzHuski Wii U gamepad was 'dumb', it had no processing capability other than wireless connection. Wii U console did all the hard work.

ALL Switch fanboys/Nintendo sites are happily ignoring Wii U MK8 rendered a separate 60fps GUI for Gamepad, that acted like the SNAP function on Xbox One which inevitablely consumes resources.

@EternalDragonX just like Switch

@EternalDragonX lol, just a slight over estimate.

@Dakt Wii U gamepad was 'dumb', it had no processing capability other than wireless connection. Wii U console did all the hard work.

ALL Switch fanboys/Nintendo sites are happily ignoring Wii U MK8 rendered a separate GUI for Gamepad, like the SNAP function on Xbox One which inevitablely consumes resources.

But yeah, now Switch is out let's pretend MK8 Wii U didn't have that separate GUI that offered SNAP on the fly.

@liveswired yes it was dumb as in it was big and bulky (and I still loved it). And no - the gamepad does have its own processor to deal with all the inputs and information being sent too and from the console and GPU.

How much processing power do you actually think it takes to render a "static" map with dots that move overit?? Let me tell you - nothing. There was no form of console overhead where there was "magically" more power the console had because of that touch screen. There is a reason it was used in nearly all cases for maps, inventory and other things. Because it had the extra CPU and hardware designed to deal with this.

Yes it is kinda of like snap - in that resources are tied up to enable its use. But unlike the Wii U - the Xbone had to use only the CPU assets it was given. Again, the Wii U had tailored hardware to deal with streaming, as well as an extra CPU for processing extra information.

Get your head out of the clouds - there is nothing that gamepad was doing that stopped MK8 from going above 720p. Only the hardware limitations of the system.

Looking forward to this! it's out two days before my birthday...

@thesilverbrick I thought they had said this earlier and am disappointed it's not the case. 60fps on MK8 is beautiful and I don't enjoy it anywhere near as much with four players.

theres also a new mode called renegade rampant where you use piranha plants to capture your opponents.

@TheWhiteFalcon Digital Foundry confirmed there's no drop this time.

Part of me wonders why Shin'en made their game 60 fps up to four screens, and Nintendo didn't though. And FAST even stays at 1080p regardless while docked doesn't it?

@Pod

You would have no way of noticing if it was the first option.

@Dezzy
I certainly would be able to tell if I was looking at a 480p image downsampled to 360p, running right next to an image rendered natively at that resolution. At least if I knew I was looking for it.

@DatDog Not in the clouds. Wii U was running a locked 60FPS in Mario Kart 8 SP. I'd day it could've been pushed further on Wii U only Nintendo played it safe.

@Giygas_95 drops to 720p undocked lad.

@liveswired Notice I said while docked.