Topic: What Switch Games Will You Revisit With A Performance Boost?

This is a shameless copy of a topic that I saw on another forum, but it’s a good one!

If the Switch 2 is providing a performance boost, what games will you play through/revisit? I’ve been thinking about this since I saw that the Switch 2 was backwards compatible. I’ve purchased some games (during sales) with the hope that there’s a patch/ performance boost in the hopes that graphics/load times will improve. Here’s a few that I will absolutely revisit/ start:

• BOTW/TOTK: I’ve been patiently waiting for a 4k enhanced version since the rumors came out last year.
• Hogwarts Legacy: played about an hour of it, and it’s much better (performance wise) than I expected on the switch, and if load times can be improved, I’ll be jumping back into it
• Wreckfest: plays great on the Switch, I’d love to see some higher resolutions
• Doom 2016/Eternal: The games look great to me, but a resolution boost would be welcome
• Witcher 3: one of my favorite games I’ve played and would love a reason to give it some more time. The textures can be a little rough, I would love to see a shinier version
  Hellblade: such a beautiful game, excited to see what a boost could do

Honestly, I will probably download my entire Switch collection to see how the game look.

I'm sure they're going to optimize them to play better on SW2 but this is Nintendo, okay? High-fidelity 4K graphics aren't really their priority.

@Lazz Yeah, Hogwarts Legacy is decent enough on the switch. And it gets big discount sales monthly, I think. Yeah, I'm curious if switch 2 will yield a boost to the existing version, or better version of HL.

(If anyone else is reading, you don't need the HL deluxe version. I like other stuff in the game better than the couple things the dlc gives you. So, I'd only get the deluxe version if it's the better deal at the time of buying.)

@N00BiSH eh, just looking to see what they look like with a performance boost. All the “closed door” botw demo reports from a while ago (was that 1.5 years ago now?) claimed 4k. I really don’t care, just excited to see how optimizations impact graphics/performance.

@WoomyNNYes I picked up the deluxe version because it was cheaper than the current sale. I agree, the dlc is not worth an extra $10

The one I would absolutely love would be a patch for Sonic Frontiers. I just want a really good, portable version of that game that isn't on steam deck. Something that makes the game look nice and run better.

Also, a up-res for Kirby and the Forgotten Land would be nice, and a patch for Paper Mario: The Origami King and Mario and Luigi Brothership would be great.

Adding another - I’ve been playing a lot of Outer Wilds lately and I’m loving it. The game is brilliant. But the game has a tendency to crash or experience significant slowdown. While I doubt that it would get a patch given what’s happened with Annapurna, one can hope that a boost in console power helps (I have no idea if it works this way)

Pokemon Scarlet, I'm not expecting anything like major visual upgrades but I hope Switch 2 is enough to stop the constant freezes in the DLC.

@Novamii love it, great points! I recall those conversations, and if S2 essentially acts as a “docked” S1, I think those performance modes would see an improvement

also Tears of the Kingdom! I tried it 2 years ago, but completely bounced off for some reason. hoping the Switch 2 will enhance the experience enough for me to come back!

There's actually a bunch of Switch games I didn't see through playing because they were capped at 30, like Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door, Princess Peach Showtime, and most recently Mario & Luigi Brothership.
I'm holding out that Nintendo will issue updates for them that enhance the experience on Switch 2.

• Cult of the Lamb - I'm not expecting a Switch 2 patch, but just existing on Switch 2 might fix some of the awful loading times and lag.
• Princess Peach Showtime - the game mostly ran fine but there were a couple localized major performance issues and I'm just curious if Switch 2 magically fixes them.
• BotW or TotK - if one of these got a big Switch 2 performance or graphics patch I would play it out of curiosity.

There are also a few games I haven't bought because I'm hoping they will be better on Switch 2 but I suppose that doesn't count as revisiting.

@FishyS all good, share even if you haven’t played it yet 😜

To be realistic, I’m only assuming that first party titles get a next-gen patch.

• Xenoblade DE/2/3/XDE: this is a personal one, the games already look and run great on Switch, but viewing them at a higher resolution would be even better.

Animal Crossing New Horizons: not sure if they’d be able to fix this but I would love if the lag on your island if you have too many items was reduced. I want to have an island dense with furniture and decorations without sacrificing frame rate and pop-in.

Pretty much every Zelda game on switch: for some reason basically every Zelda game on such has some sort of performance issue. They look good but would look even better with a smoother frame rate.

You could've said the same about high definition 1080p visuals back in the Wii era. They have a priority of cost, battery life and portability on the hardware without question. But if anything Nintendo are a company who use the hardware that they have very well indeed. The amount of visual polish Nintendo has put into their games is top tier stuff

I see no major reason why a remake of WW/TP couldn't be running at 4K. Other than possibly the devs pushing the image quality further in some other area and deciding that a lower resolution (1080p/1440p) with a higher framerate, better draw distance, better lighting or something woupd give a better end result than than hunting down 4K

I don't disagree at all with that. The thing is though, their games don't usually prioritize graphical fidelity over artistic expertise. It's a balance that they've mostly managed to maintain.

Also I wouldn't exactly use the Zelda remakes as good examples given how they both fall a bit short in regards to their visuals.

I'd still be a bit cagey about how much of an automatic uplift, if any, games will get just from running on Switch 2.

Most of the improvement you get going from, say, PS4 to PS5 is the game running the same code at increased clock speeds, which more than doubled between generations for both the CPU and GPU. Going from Switch to Switch 2 isn't going to be nearly as big, if the leaks are to be believed; we're probably looking at more like a 25% improvement with the GPU and possibly none at all with the CPU.

Throughput might still be higher due to memory bandwidth, larger caches, etc. but games that rarely hit their frame rate caps might still struggle, especially in handheld mode. Battery life considerations are going to limit how much it can be ramped up and, even docked, it's still got a relatively compact cooling system that can only do so much.

Rather, the improved performance of the new Switch 2 is mostly going to come down to its modernity - having features that didn't exist a decade ago - and the greater parallelism offered by having more CPU cores and GPU shaders. Games are probably going to need to be actively patched to gain the full benefit of that, but we could see some big leaps in performance if they are.

There are so many games that could see a great upgrade on the Switch 2 such as The Witcher 3, anything released by Bethesda etc. It’s mostly the third party games I’m interested in seeing make the most from the new hardware and the upgrades they can give.

Are you going by the clock speed alone here? Because there's more to compute performance than just the raw clock speed. You're citing the clock speed jumps from PS4 to PS5 but in doing so ignore that from PS3 to PS4 the CPU clock halved and the GPU was only clocked 60% higher. If clock speeds mattered in these generation to generation comparisons it would be fair to say that the PS4 was slower than the PS3. But they don't, which is why the PS4 was a generational jump over the PS3 despite the lower clocks.

You can go a bit deeper and look at how many instructions can be done. Because one of the way computers have become faster is by doing more things at the same time or working out more efficient ways to do things. Which is where we get the GFLOPS measure which is basically a measure of how many calculations are happening per second. On this measure the Switch 2 isn't 25% faster than the Switch based on the reported clock speeds. It's around 5-8x faster than the Switch. A similar gap to what we saw from PS4 to PS5 and PS3 to PS4. This isn't a bad measure but again it's not the full story. If it was then there would be no need to every benchmark GPUs because you'd know all you'd need from the spec sheet

Which is why you generally need to go even deeper. You need to look at the hardware features themselves. DLSS yes, but also other kinds of specialist hardware acceleration features. You can also get more performance out of hardware by making sure that the RAM can keep up with the GPU (the Switch GPU is very memory starved). Even simpler you need to look at the development tools available and the quality of the drivers being written. And on this count especially it seems the Switch 2 is very well engineered, certainly more than any of the other commercial scale gaming devices on the market currently

Switch 2 is a generational leap for Nintendo. It's certainly not just a 25% jump

@skywake I'm only talking in the context of backwards compatibility.

Obviously, if you're using the full features of the Switch 2, you can expect a huge performance increase as well as the ability to do things that the original Switch just couldn't. We'll see all that with new games specially created for it.

However, an original Switch game running on a Switch 2 won't know about any of that, at least not unless it's been patched to utilize the extra hardware.