Nintendo Switch's lowest resolution games tested – and how a next-gen successor could boost image quality

The Nintendo Switch wasn’t pushing the envelope in terms of performance when it launched with an modest Tegra X1 chip back in 2017, but its relatively modern graphics meant that the system could run recent titles without a massive development effort. On the flipside, its meagre levels of compute performance – a necessary compromise for a power-limited mobile device – often required big sacrifices to rendering resolution. With the Switch reportedly soon to be replaced by a successor, we thought we’d survey some of these efforts to see just how low-res the most demanding titles got – so just how low can the Nintendo Switch go?

First, some ground rules. We’ve evaluated these games by their lowest typical resolution, in portable mode, with full 3D graphics – but note that this is meant to be a sampling rather than a definitive list.

The first game I looked at is firmly in standard definition territory. Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fueled renders at 854×480 in portable play, with no anti-aliasing. When you’re at a resolution this low, AA sometimes hurts more than it helps, so you will notice that several of these titles drop the technique entirely. In practice, Crash Team Racing looks quite messy in motion on the Switch – the screen is flooded with jagged edges. On the plus side it does look fairly sharp, but it certainly does distract from what is otherwise a solid version of the kart racing remake.

Not quite so sharp is one of the most technologically impressive of Switch’s ‘impossible ports’ – conversions that manage to squeeze a top-end title onto Nintendo’s power-limited hybrid console. Most visual settings have been scaled down fairly elegantly – but there’s no hiding the cut-back resolution, which drops as low as 810×456. The Witcher 3 is a slower-paced game that renders detail into the far distance, and really demands a much higher level of precision in my view. By default, there’s a fairly mediocre post-process AA enabled that does a decent job of cleaning up the image at the expense of some blurriness. Interestingly, many of the game’s settings can be disabled, including AA. With everything dialed down, 576p seems like a more common typical resolution, and the game can actually reach a full 720p in some scenes – a big improvement from the default, albeit at the cost of some key features. Regardless of the options you pick however, this isn’t a particularly clean experience – open world titles benefit enormously from pixel-precise detailing and Nintendo’s console is simply not up to the task.