Best graphics on Nintendo Switch: seven years of third-party developer brilliance
Impossible ports. That phrase is our shorthand for the conversion of console and PC titles to the Switch that seem almost inconceivable, pushing the aging Tegra X1 hardware in the seven-year-old Nintendo handheld to its absolute limits. That’s what we’re focusing on today as we round up the best-looking and most technically accomplished third-party releases on Switch, following on from our retrospective of the best-looking first-party Nintendo releases last month.
As well as the impossible ports, we’ve rounded up a surfeit of other games that impressed on launch – or have been substantially improved by later upgrades – to become some of the most incredible-looking games on the platform. We’re talking Doom, we’re talking Crysis, and plenty more too. There are even some great Switch releases that go beyond their home console equivalents, adding more modern TAA (temporal anti-aliasing) and other features to make Switch the premiere place to experience some titles. There are a huge variety of genres and game engines represented on the list, and it’s fascinating to see what techniques developers used to make the most of the Switch platform.
We’ll start with the meatiest category: the impossible ports, the graphically intense or wide-ranging games that we couldn’t quite believe would make the transition to Switch intact – but did. The archetypal example here is undoubtedly The Witcher 3, as its graphical fidelity and huge open world meant that even the home console versions on PS4 and Xbox One were pushed extremely hard – often well below 30fps. With the Switch operating on a meagre power budget thanks to its portable nature, realising that vision on the Switch seemed a daunting prospect – but original developers CDPR and porting studio Saber Interactive somehow made it work.
The cutbacks from the other console versions to Switch are far-ranging, with cuts to resolution, shadows, reflections, LODs and many other settings. Yet the core visual character of the game remains intact, with impressive water and environments, and performance is a surprisingly stable 30fps outside of CPU-heavy areas like the city of Novigrad. Playing on portable mode minimises the effect of the lower resolution, and having what is a hugely long and dense game in the palm of your hand is pretty special. The developers have even added in options to disable more effects like AA and bloom to help push better performance, and with an overclocked Switch 60fps is within the realms of possibility – an incredible turnout.
