Alan Wake Remastered, The Outer Worlds and GTA Trilogy Definitive Editions also revisited.
The Nintendo Switch isn’t the easiest console to work with.
NMS was always going to be a tough Switch port.
Texture detail is still a bit on the blurry side at times, but appears quite clean.
This is mainly due to the considerable number of samples taken in the final temporal upsampling pass.
This is by far the single most important change we made in terms of performance.
This allowed us to merge some FSR2 passes with our own and amortise their cost in the process.
It also enabled us to port some passes from compute to fragment.
These changes made the bulk of the difference.
A lot of time was also spent fine-tuning various heuristics to balance sharpness, stability and ghosting.
With our 4.40 update, DRS is also now enabled on Switch.
So this is it, a short high-level overview of how we ported FSR2 to Switch.
Even then, the target 30fps was thoroughly elusive.
These days, the two key post-processing effects absent from the original release have made a return.
Ambient occlusion adds a huge amount of lighting detail to the environment, filling out crevices rather nicely.
Likewise, depth of field is now present for character close-ups, enhancing dialogue sequences with cinematic flair.
The Outer Worlds doesn’t look amazing on Switch but it is improved - as is performance.
It’s still unstable, but nowhere near as bad as it was.
I also looked at the GTA Trilogy Definitive Editions.
These UE4-powered remasters are somewhat controversial and disappointed upon their release in 2021.
On the visual front, not much has changed.
The games still suffer from cut-back post-processing and other visual concessions.
However, there’s improvement on the performance side.
The updated release runs just fine at 30fps, and manages to operate without frame-pacing problems.
It’s a solid turnaround from the initial version, and it does prove satisfying to play and control.
Textures appear crisper, ambient occlusion is back, and the reflections also appear just fine here.
I’m not a huge fan of the general visual changes made in the remaster to begin with.
Alan Wake was a dark, contrasty game with heavy vignetting and thick post-processing.
And it’s been both fun and heartening to see genuine improvements in titles that unimpressed us at launch.
We’d love to take a look.
