Video: Digital Foundry Gives Its Full Tech Analysis of Super Mario Odyssey

Very nice, I find it fascinating to see the tricks Nintendo uses to keep things running smoothly.

Booking tomorrow off work was possibly one of the best decisions I've ever made

I don't care, I just want it.

GG Nintendo.

Wow
What is secret ingredients to make Gorgeous Mario games ?
Is it Chemical X ? (Whoopsie... Powerpuff Girls secret ingredients )

Anyway, great to hear.

Cue the "all cartoony, non-realistic games must be 1080P, 60FPS" comments.

Just goes to show how Breath of the Wild might run had it been developed for Switch form the ground up

Less than 5 hours til the midnight launch

I'm most impressed by the loading times and the 5GB size. They should do video just on game size. I know a lot of it is probably cut scenes and sound, but 5GB is nuts for an open world game of this caliber. That's an update patch for some games these days.

All the rest of the stuff, FPS, resolution, shadows, seems stable enough I'm not going to notice. It's going to look awesome on my 52" 1080p tv and I'm never going to play it in handheld mode.

I do wonder how Jump Up, Super Star! is going to sound on my 5.1 surround system, so far I've only heard it on mono phones and tablets and my cheap PC speakers. I'm expecting to get up and dance when the game starts.

About 20 more hours, plus the download wait. That wait is going to feel much longer than it is.

What compromise? It looks great and you won't notice most of those tricks unless your looking for them. This makes me wonder why other developers don't try to aim for 60fps more often using similar techniques, especially on the more powerful consoles. Cannot wait to play this tomorrow

@rjejr
Why can't you pre-download it?

would be pretty funny if there were a metabombing war between mario and knack fans now

@rjejr You're not pre-downloading?

Nevermind, I totally forgot you are getting the system tomorrow! Hope you enjoy!

I don't care, DF. Sad everything needs to be picked apart these days. The game is excellent.

@rjejr FYI, "Jump Up, Super Star!" is available to purchase on the iTunes store (and potentially other stores too), and it sounds glorious compared to the youtube audio I've been listening so far.

@EVIL-C how is it sad? It's great we the gamers to see how games are developed and all the tech is broken down.

If the technology was around 20 Years ago they would have done the same then.

@EVIL-C DF actually praises the game way more than you'd think. They're just delving deeper into just how much effort went into achieving such a game.

IMO Nintendolife did them a disservice with that "compromise" sub-title.

@HappyMaskedGuy Troof right thurr

@rjejr I was thinking the same thing with my speakers and sub! lol

That's fine. Slight visual compromises are worth maintaining a silky smooth framerate. The game will look good regardless.

@rjejr enjoy my friend, please let me know how you get on, excited for you and your family!

I find these videos very interesting. They unpick the art of making video games with forensic detail. It's always fascinated me to find out how things are made.

I'm so excited I feel 25 years younger

I wasn't going to comment but what this shows is that Nintendo are sort of like a magician. They concentrate on where the eye is focused. And the background stuff is exactly that, background. You won't or shouldn't be focusing on that when you're playing, Nintendo know that. The DF video has to slow it right down to highlight a lot of their points. They acknowledge it themselves that they are only nitpicking on an otherwise near flawless game.

I'm glad they focused on getting 60fps for Mario Odyssey. BotW desperately needed a higher frame rate.

I'm so glad it runs at 60fps! Responsiveness is the core of any game. I'd rather have 480p at 60fps than anything higher in resolution at a lower framerate!

@carlos82

they do i believe. MS uses a butt-load of adaptive resolution in games like halo and forza.

sony's ps4 pro uses a lot of the tiling method that allows it to get to or close to 4k.

but really, 60fps solid at a nice res you go PC or maybe whatever the xbox x can do. ps4 pro in 1080 could also do pretty well at 60 in most games i'd imagine.

we all knew the switch was underpowered compared to home consoles but that's not what it is so i don't care. mario looks great, rabbids looks great, BOTW looks great, heck, even doom looks good imo.

it's also something they can release a new system maybe every 2-3 years with an updated tegra and keep bc for all games and make new ones look nicer. hey MS and Sony are doing it and N never shied away from that with the 3ds line. I think that's the plan really.

Good thing it's impossible to see anything of this in real time and good thing it doesn't matter AT ALL.

And this is why Nintendo will never give a flying fudge about the power gap.

@sword_9mm I know that they do use some techniques but they're usually targeted at increasing detail and resolution rather than framerates. This is why I prefer Nintendo games as they don't waste resources trying to make games look as realistic as possible but simply use what's available to make it as fun to play as they can. I don't care too much what the framerates are, though it does surprise me that no matter how many generations of consoles we go through they never increase as developers just want to push pixel counts. The Xbox one x is a prime example of this, once again it'll be mainly 30fps games looking a bit sharper. Not that it matters too much to me as I split my time between my Switch and SNES just playing great games 😃

@rjejr
Hope you have an A/V reciever to get that
5.1, my dolby atmos setup is just begging to blast that out
(just wish it actually supported atmos, damn you LPCM 5.1)

@Yorumi I'm not talking about going beyond 60fps but that the majority of games still target 30fps as they try to increase detail instead. I had the PS4 Pro and have a good 4K tv and whilst the HDR was great, the increase in resolution didn't make the games look much better. Games like Crash Bandicoot, Ratchet and Clank are 30fps yet the Nintendo equivalent in Mario Odyssey is 60fps

@invictus4000 I concur. So much of what DF analyzes I simply can't see, even when I'm looking for it. When they analyzed MK8 (Wii U), they said it ran at 60fps, but that something caused one frame out of every 64 to be duplicated and replace the following frame, which was then skipped, after which the cycle would begin again. The net effect was of a moment of 30fps roughly once a second, and IIRC they said something in their analysis to the effect of once you see it you can't unsee it. Well, I can't see it. I've never seen it, and not for lack of trying. All of these "compromises"--I'll never even notice.

It also means that the Switch is capable of so much more than people realize, and that it just requires some extra time in development. Of course whether or not that extra expense is worth it to the publisher is an entirely different question. (And it also suggests why developers want as much power as possible--not because they're lazy, but because it's so much cheaper, and thus less risky financially, not to require time consuming and expensive optimization.)

The presenter talks about compromise!! Is he nuts? The game looks beautiful. Compromise should be used as a word to describe severe changes, not 99,9 pixels instead of 100.

Digital Foundry. Sapping the fun outta gaming since 2007.

I'm always interested in these teardowns. Nice once again to see Nintendo pulling the strings and showing 'rival' developers how to properly manipulate hardware to it's advantage. Trolls will always point to where they believe the technical achievements suffer, but these few are to be reminded this is under a lab environment, 99.9% of us playing in real terms will only be blown away by what we are witnessing.

No screen-tearing and constantly changing (low) framerates here.

@Yorumi @carlos82 I was just about to say the same thing. Until the refresh rate of most screens is above 60hz, 60fps will be the max the developers will aim for.

@carlos82

i wouldn't say that. forza and halo were both to get fps over detail; same as with what N is doing.

now the checkerboard stuff with the ps4 pro is to get the res up at an acceptable framerate since the machine isn't powerful enough for 4k on it's own. the xbox x will be but it's newer and more powerful. such the life of technology.

fun games are fun and i'm with DF and wanting N to keep a 900p or something like that 60 without all the tricks but i don't really care. i play 100% in portable so i won't be able to tell anyway. that and i'm not a spring chicken any more so even on the tv i wouldn't be able to tell.

edit: i play zelda in portable and think it looks really nice even at 30fps. sure i love witcher 3 high detail 100fps but i'm a lot of times more for art style than just straight up realism.

@Tsurii For Wii U, there's Cemu. For NS, nothing yet...

@Yorumi I would say diminishing returns occur after about 100 FPS. It's difficult for most console players to judge this because most of them (and most people in general, really) have never experienced a modern 144+ Hz 1440p+ FreeSync or G-Sync monitor paired with a CPU/GPU that can push the output well past 60 FPS with high settings. With HDR coming down the pike in a couple years, new HDR displays will give the 1080p and 1440p resolutions an extra lease on life that will further stave off the incentive for 4K. (Current LCD-LED 4K displays will look pretty ugly next to the upcoming qLED HDR displays...)

Neither XB1X nor PS4Pro will be able to maximize the use of native HDR displays with 60+ FPS, so obviously the NS won't either... Not like that matters for a portable console. It just means there's even less incentive to get any new console other than an NS in the near future. (Granted, XB1X and PS4Pro have an HDR setting that can potentially be used for titles supporting it, but those will be few and far between compared to PC- just look at https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/ps4-pro-enhanced-games/ for an example of how rarely the setting has been usable right now.)

I dont see any of these tricks as something bad, actually I see as HOW DEDICATED THE DEV TEAM WAS TO MAKE THE MOST GORGEOUS MARIO EVER WITH ALL THE JUICE POSSIBLE FROM SWITCH.

and I'm just over here waiting for Super Luigi Iliad.

I didn't watch but listened. I find it hard to believe knowing Nintendo they'd go all out up front on a game this early/year on a new system because then it would be all downhill from there. Nintendo always holds back, but that aside what I heard is fantastic news.

@MartyFlanMJFan I've been trying to decide where to keep track of my notes since no Miiverse. I always like starting up a game of this magnitude and giving my initial thoughts about random things other people may not notice. Of course I'll be trying Switch for the first time as well so there may be some overlap. But I'll let ya know. I'm expecting good things.

@Spoony_Tech "Nevermind, I totally forgot you are getting the system tomorrow!"

I'm getting old, you're getting senile. jk

My wife just got back from GS to pick up a # so I could get it quicker at midnight. Only they wanted her to pay and I have the GS credit card so she couldn't. I'll take my chances at midnight. I'm gonna go take a nap for an hour.

I've already got my game pre-ordered, and barring absolute catastrophe, will have it picked up no later than tomorrow after work!

Though this analysis does show the seams of the Switch hardware a bit, on balance, I'm not only "okay" with what they accomplished, but actually quite a bit more than okay! I'm quite pleased, in fact! These performance figures are actually quite a bit -BETTER- than the last figures I heard in earlier builds, so, all I'm hearing is improvement. Besides, the little details everywhere make it an incredible presentation anyway, so I'm actually quite pleased!

It's showing more and more the performance gap between the Switch and the WiiU, and that that gap is quite a bit bigger than a lot of voices were fearing in the early goings. Far enough ahead of the WiiU to make me happy, and not far enough behind the XB1 to make me sad. Besides, if I really need absolute performance, I just leapfrog the consoles entirely and go to PC anyway. At least the Switch I can take with me!

So yeah, not only is this news not off-putting at all, but it only leaves me even happier than I was before seeing it....and I was pretty darn happy already!

Barring tremendously significant negative circumstances, which are utterly unforeseeable at the moment, I will have this thing in my grasp absolutely no later than the coming 6pm Central daylight time!

Yay!

To all the rest of you getting this game on launch day, I hope it's as awesome for you as it's been billed to be! Have a blast, guys and gals! I know I will be!

Cheers!

fps> resolution every day of the week. 60fps or go home

@Emperor-Palpsy nah, BOTW is an open world game. Mario is more open sandbox small worlds. even if BOTW was on the XB1X it wouldnt be running at 60fps.

Imagine Digital Floundery describing a Van Gogh painting. '...with each pass of the brush, approximately 216 bristles connect with the canvas. Unfortunately, Van Gogh doesn't target this consistently, with him hitting to the low end of 164 in some areas. The painting retains a reliable zero frames a second which is perfectly adequate for this painting..." WHERE IS THE JOY?

I don't care.

This game has had more 10s thrown at it than your average employee at Spearmint Rhino.

@EternalDragonX @AlexSora89 You're joking, right Dragon? The Xbox 1X could easily run BotW at 60fps. Just a normal xbone has double the ram and CPU cores (and those cores clock higher than Switch cores) and 4.5x the GPU cores. If you think for a second that the XboneX couldn't run it at 90fps, you're delusional xD

Nintendo once again showing how true development looks. King of software!

@tanookisuit

it's not hard to go all out when the system just isn't very powerful. due to the architecture the xb1/ps4 were already pushed to 100% or near very early on.

@sword_9mm I'm aware of its limits, but I'm also very aware that no console developer will blow out their hardware within months of release too because it's a horrible business decision. If you max it out early since you can't throw added chips at it like the 80s and 90s did, you're stuck. We'll just see how it goes next go around on a Mario or Zelda title and draw comparisons then, or even a second generation release period game which perhaps Metroid would fall into since it has been worked on post-release while these things started pre-release.

@tanookisuit

there might be some interesting tricks they can use to get around it but every console this gen was maxed day one.

not to say the next zelda or metroid or whatever won't look good; i think mario/zelda look nice already.

coming from PC gaming this gen really was weak comparatively. xb1x makes up for some of that but that's a new gen imo (as is ps4 pro). next switch iteration (be that 2 or 3 years away) should get up to xb1/ps4 level i'd wager. being portable it'll always be behind but that doesn't mean you can't do good games/graphics.

@PanurgeJr I don't remember the video saying once you see the 59 frames per second thing on Mario Kart Wii u you cant unsee it. It seems like they said it's basically unnoticable. I'd imagine very few people would notice that one skipped frame refresh since many people say they can't see the difference between 30 and 60. I just think every developer should cut polugons out, or reduce resolution, or whatever it takes to get a smooth and very responsive 60 fps on every game.

@Ledgendt
That's very much not what my comment meant...