Plus: Ark Survival Evolved revisited ahead of its Switch revamp.

First, some ground rules.

Interestingly, many of the game’s tweaks can be disabled, including AA.

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We can go much lower than this, however.

On paper,Mortal Kombat 11is one of the most ambitious Switch conversions out there.

There are plenty of controls downgrades of course, but the slashed resolution is the most visually conspicuous problem.

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MK11 renders at just 682x384 at lowest, which you’ll typically see during cutscenes and fatality moves.

Perhaps sensibly, AA is dropped as well here, which gives the title a chunky but sharp look.

In general, these ports retain most of the visual features fundamental to the engine but sacrifice frame-rate.

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For evidence of that, just look atWRC 8.

The WRC games are somewhat infamous on Switch thanks to massive compromises relative to their home console counterparts.

WRC 8 packs more background detail than later entries, but perhaps as a consequence, image quality suffers.

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Again, this title dips to 360p at lowest, with resolutions often hovering not much above.

That’s a very low resolution indeed and it seems like a sensible floor for dynamic resolution scalers.

However, I did manage to find three titles that do offer sub-360p rendering.

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The super-sharp but low-res approach harkens back to the 3D rendering common on systems like the Nintendo DS.

The next game is equally low-res, but for perhaps less noble reasons.

Ark: Survival Evolved is a notoriously low-quality port, with awful image quality and miserable framerates.

Ark looks more like a painting than a game.

Early offscreen footage looks promising, showcasing big improvements to draw distance and framerate.

There’s one last title to discuss - the absolute lowest resolution 3D game I could find on Switch.

With a resolution beneath most graphing calculators, the game itself is borderline unplayable in this mode.

It’s in here almost on a technicality, therefore.

I couldn’t find any other graphically sophisticated titles that came close to matching Ark’s dismal pixel counts.

This got me thinking: how might a future Switch cope with similar challenges?

I suspect advanced reconstruction techniques, like AMD’s FSR 2.0, will be the key.

These techniques produce more detailed images with low input resolutions.

The elephant in the room is Nvidia’s DLSS.