A chunky response =O
I literally can't see the pixel differences at a comfortable viewing distance, so I would never see a benefit
But I recognize that there is a large minority of players who can.
For me, how close i have it depends mostly on the screen. Links Awakening, animal crossing? further away.
Smash? with so much small stuff going on, closer. Kirby? further away. Pokemon Legends?
close, with how many small stuff was far away and could be overlooked.
I ma nearsighted, and have good eyesight there, but have 1.5 in the far.
Again, if the pixel density is above you visual acuity, these upgrades are invisible. If AA would make the flicker go away, then the flicker isn't caused by the pixel grid of the hardware. If the native rendering resolution of the game is 720p, and you integer scale it to 1440p, nothing changes.
Yeah, if its above visual acuity, then there would be no improvement.
Oh for shure, AA would remove it... but more pixels would remove the need for AA.
We both know what the point of AA is, and that with infinite (or say above visual acuity) resolution there would be no need for AA.
I probably would have less of a gripe with the resolution if nintendo would use AA more, but as it stands it neither uses AA nor is the resolution high enough that AA is not needed. The flicker i descirbe comes from the shift by single pixels. Say a "powerline infront of a white cloud", black on white, if would be a step lader without AA, and in worst cases youre right on the edge. the best i can compare the visual effect for me is Z-fighting.
Its rare, i have to admit. (And the worst example is a bad case for me, because it was sub native render resolution, so...^^")
I am sorry, that was not my intention. I wasn't arguing with you, I was commenting. The "phones do it, why doesn't the Switch" argument comes up a lot for the screens, so I was just rapidly summarizing what has come up in the thread before.
It was more from a battery vs resolution perspective, and a "you cant see more details". You can, phones definitely need it way more then the switch, but there is a benefit of higher resolution, and the pure display power drain seems to be minimal when they opt for ultra resolutions (5-600ppi) instead of saving power.
My intend was never to say "the benefit would be the same and we need as high a resolution as phones. Especially since they have higher resolutions on smaller screens. My goal would probably be the classic "300ppi is enough" scope, since then its "retina" for about 2 feet for static images (print). I dont see the point in more, and thats the upper limit i would like to move. Im actually mostly fine with switch, my pasion here comes mainly from the size increase to the OLED. Thats around 209ppi, and that does feel kinda grainy compared to my other screens (notebook and monitor 166ppi but further away, phone i think 4-500ppi).
Its nitpicking, im aware. But for me the OLED, without HDR, was not a pure Upgrade in terms of display because of that.
Right now games are built with two performance profiles, that are tied to screen resolution. You're suggesting adding a third (1080p, handheld). Games would need to be updated to take advantage of this third profile. That is all I'm saying.
There are more profiles, but yeah, they only decide for 2, and for full support they would need to implement a third. How hard that would be cant be sad without the concrete hardware, and i also mentioned, old ones or developer that dont want to support all, could decide for only one . But that opens the next can of worms, if they decide for 720 and its the lower one they decide, then people will riot again
actually... wont they already need to support 4 in some cases? Old Switch twice and new switch twice?
(asuming backwards compatibility for most games for a while)... in that case the old profiles could be the "low power" ones.
oh good
I don't think it would be very costly to ignore it, certainly
well...true that
There are other downsides you're not mentioning.
720p doesn't integer scale to 1080p for example. Hilariously, games which max out handheld resolution now would look slightly worse on a 1080p screen. If you can see the pixels on the current screen you will definitely see the upscaling jaggies on a 1080p screen
oh, for shure. i still think that the jump from 720 to 1080 would be so high, that the quality of the scale would be visually pleasing, since it would fell like a soft AA kinda... if you get what i mean. I would need to test it, and it would be rather subjective. Maybe im off here.
But we also see it with resolutions >1080, where non native is way less of a problem for the perception compared to <1080 (if youre not watching on a huge screen). even on the 7" screen 1080 would be >300ppi, more then we can resolve.
But yeah, valid point that scaling would be less clear, ... but then again, with so many games using dynamic resolution, this kinda is a mute point, and all hinges on how the majority of games uses the new found power.
Plenty of games currently struggle to hit 720p now in handheld, often at 30fps. Given better hardware, Saber Interactive aren't going to bring 540p Witcher 3 up to 1080p handheld, they're going to get to 720p handheld, and if there is power left over they're going to spend it getting frame rate up.
If with the increase we know is coming they cant push to 1080, then there is a clear problem somewhere, maybe in some optimizations specifically made for the base switch. Witcher 3 is 1080 on PS4 with higher resolution effects and textures. That should be posible.
The question of developers are going to go back for updates, thats another one... and yeah, that i think wont happen for many games.
And when they do bring the game up to 720p, it can look crisp and clean on a 720p screen, or it can have upscaling artifacts on a 1080p screen.
In the current market, the 720p OLED is also more expensive. I think in the near future that will change, as the phone market drives the 720p screen into a niche product, but for now, you're paying more for that screen.
So d) your best performing legacy games now look slightly worse, and e) it drives up the cost of the device
are we shure that 720 is not already on the out? i dont see many new tablets with 720p oled screens, and for phones that screen is to big.
Then again, those screens where probably used more for Cars and IoT devices (fridges, etc), so who even knows how long they will be available.
And i would argue, if they dont get an update, then the 1080p screen would work as rudementary AA to some of those games (again, some would like it, some not). But yeah, nor im just contrarian, that is a point (except, maybe nvidia is working with nintendo on an AI upscaler specifically for older games =P )
VNs probably would benefit, yeah, as you're more comfortable bringing static images closer to your face. But again, if you're me, and you don't see the pixel gutters, no amount of resolution improvement will ever cause visual improvement.
I would much rather Switch games make changing the text size for handheld mode standard behavior, right now games default to rendering identically in both cases, and it's terrible, but that's a digression
100% with you on the texture size front. I have a lot of opinions to screen resolution, but as i mentioned, its the least of my worries with this new iteration (the most is, i want HDR, and nintendo to not cheap out on BotW2 and give it sizable visual improvements to the Original that is not just the resolution)
Text on phones, like on a webpage, are rendered by the OS font rendering engine, and scale to any resolution infinitely, without applications having to be patched.
shure (was confused for a moment, but yeah, its only on desktop that browsers use their own text rendering engines)
In games, text is either static images or rendered to an offscreen buffer then blitted to the screen. The automatic improvements to clarity as the resolution of the screen goes up don't apply to games. In those cases the switch won't benefit
wait, no. Static images, yeah, but rendered text does get rendered to the needed resolution, what do you mean? That it is first rendered to a buffer does not change that.
Also, just played a round smash, and one thing i realized: the images in the charactere select screen are obviously just down scaled without filtering, so it really looks noizy on the "low resolution"... some would call it sharp. Just one case where a higher resolution owuld help (mind you, i know that just a higher res screen would not help if the game is still rendered in 720)
More and more games are rendering UI elements at higher resolution than the game proper which can ameliorate this, but games need to actually do it. I don't have a problem with 720p text elements, I have a problem with tiny text at any resolution, or text rendered at 360p because the game engine is struggling. But I admit to being 40 years old. In these cases, as you said, the Switch would benefit. I'm not arguing that (as I clearly said in my previous message)
I kinda asumed that rendering the UI native while the gameplay is dynamic was standard by now. At least most games i see do that.
Or do you mean they render them higher and downsample them?
You're correct, a 1080p screen would be a legitimate upgrade for players with good eyesight, or who play text heavy games, or who just play relatively close to their face, but only if games support it. Unlike phones, these benefits would not come to legacy games.
Which is my primary point. Phones aren't consoles. You will not see these benefits unless games are patched to run at higher resolutions in handheld mode, and phone use cases drive them to provide higher resolution screens, while on Switch the use case is only for a subset of users capable of seeing the difference, for the subset of games capable of rendering at that higher resolution, and only the subset of those that have budget to support adding Drake specific features.
I was rambling a lot know, sorry for that.
TLDR:
im with you, that phones are not consoles, higher resolutions are more relevant there.
Im aware that its nitpicky and the resolution of the switch is fine.
In the long run i would wish for a bump, the next iteration not geting it wont be the end.
What im against is the narative that better resolution would not benefit the switch at all,
or that the drawback in power would be so huge that it would never make sense.
There are games and scenarios where it would benefit, some of them can be solved differently
(like for developers to start designing their UI not only with docked in mind...),
some of them cant (beautiful full resolution artwork, detailed rather static scenes).
Bonus: labo would work reasonably well with 1080, 720 is to little for Labo 2 =P (now im joking, i stoped beliving in a VR headset from nintendo)