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Reviews Digital Foundry || The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - DF Tech Review - Is It Really 'Too Big for Switch'...?

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Dcubed said:
That's my ultimate takeaway here. It's pretty sad that a new console basically reached its full potential with a Wii U port on day 1, but that's the state of modern video game consoles and game development I suppose. What you see on day 1 now reflects the entire future of a console (and the same is also true of PS4, PS5, Xbone and Xbox Series).

The days of game developers squeezing every last drop of juice out of a console over its lifetime as they learn the ins and outs of its hardware are long gone. For better or worse, you will never see the same-console advancements that we used to see back in the days of the 16 & 32 bit eras, or even the PS3/360 generation ever again.
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Luigi's Mansion 3 says Hi.

BotW is an incredible game, and does what it does superlatively, but to say there hasn't been any advancement in visuals over the life of Switch just isn't true. LM3, Metroid Prime Remastered, Doom, New Pokemon Snap and other games show a clear jump in graphical quality compared to what was available early on in the Switch's life.
 
JazzPotatoes said:
Luigi's Mansion 3 says Hi.

BotW is an incredible game, and does what it does superlatively, but to say there hasn't been any advancement in visuals over the life of Switch just isn't true. LM3, Metroid Prime Remastered, Doom, New Pokemon Snap and other games show a clear jump in graphical quality compared to what was available early on in the Switch's life.
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I kind of agree with that just based on the ports that have been added. Heck I never thought I'd see Witcher 3 make it onto the switch.
 
Shit, I forgot the Switch port of Alien Isolation.

No one thought we were getting third party ports that good when the Switch first came out
 
Armoured_Bear said:
WTF is a "frame rate cronie"?

Honestly, some of the tech talk smacks of silly fanboysim from supporters of the low-powered console.
There is nothing wrong with wanting high resolution, FPS, effects, better sound etc.
Nintendo have amazing artists but games have been held back for years because of poor image quality, lack of AA etc.
Wanting to get the best out of that great art is normal .
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Maybe tech doesn't matter to us? We just want good games lol
 
So a more polished experience for a game more ambitious than the original. Sounds good to me. I wonder why they didn't use the upscaling technique from Xenoblade 3
 
Armoured_Bear said:
WTF is a "frame rate cronie"?

Honestly, some of the tech talk smacks of silly fanboysim from supporters of the low-powered console.
There is nothing wrong with wanting high resolution, FPS, effects, better sound etc.
Nintendo have amazing artists but games have been held back for years because of poor image quality, lack of AA etc.
Wanting to get the best out of that great art is normal .
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Yeah they're clearly held back considering all the poor reviews ToTK received, especially for its art, graphics and performance
 
Everyone wants the best performance possible. I mean, you won’t find anyone to explain that it’s not better to have the most accomplished equipment possible. But it is not at all the same thing to wish that and to invent that games are necessarily pulled down because of the technique. It is perfectly legitimate to worry about performance, and it is equally legitimate not to want to make a disease because of a framerate that would not be at 60 fps for example.
 
As is becoming usual in DF threads, it's important to lay out that wanting stable frame rates and performance is not a graphics warrior thing. Wanting locked frame rates is not the same as wanting fancy ray tracing or higher polygon budgets.

Ultimately, frame rates not only impact gameplay, they can actually have a negative impact on the player. Consistent judder, or sub-30 frame rates aren't bad just because they look bad, they can actually cause headaches and eye strain for players susceptible to them.

Just throwing this out there to try and prevent any further bickering about whether frame rates are bad or not. TotK hitting a mostly consistent 30 is great, and honestly a lot better than other recent games on higher end platforms, but there are reasons why sub-30 drops are so disliked by so many people.
 
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JazzPotatoes said:
Luigi's Mansion 3 says Hi.

BotW is an incredible game, and does what it does superlatively, but to say there hasn't been any advancement in visuals over the life of Switch just isn't true. LM3, Metroid Prime Remastered, Doom, New Pokemon Snap and other games show a clear jump in graphical quality compared to what was available early on in the Switch's life.
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The thing about luigis mansion and pokemon snap is that they are in very limited controlled enviroments, so they can crank things up because the scale is small. You definitely see more compromises made for games like zelda’s, or mario odyssey for example.
 
Armoured_Bear said:
WTF is a "frame rate cronie"?

Honestly, some of the tech talk smacks of silly fanboysim from supporters of the low-powered console.
There is nothing wrong with wanting high resolution, FPS, effects, better sound etc.
Nintendo have amazing artists but games have been held back for years because of poor image quality, lack of AA etc.
Wanting to get the best out of that great art is normal .
Click to expand...


Those are fair criticisms but people will say 30 fps with few drops is unplayable. But every reviewer even DF said it was fine. Same with resolution.
 
Hocot8 said:
I think his point is that their work can and should look better than the tech allows it to be.
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and that point is complete nonsense

ToTK looks outstanding and putting it on PS5 or whatever isn't going to drastically improve the game to Horizon 2 or Witcher 3 levels like you think
 
Instro said:
Why are people shit posting in a tech thread? If you don't care about performance/visuals, then why are you in this thread to begin with?
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because the actual tech review is largely positive and quite impressed with what they've managed to accomplish on the hardware, and people are still finding ways to spin that as a negative.
 
Beanstar40 said:
The thing about luigis mansion and pokemon snap is that they are in very limited controlled enviroments, so they can crank things up because the scale is small. You definitely see more compromises made for games like zelda’s, or mario odyssey for example.
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Oh, I don't disagree with that at all. The post I was replying to was making the argument that graphics technology hasn't improved on the Switch throughout it's life. My point is that whatever one can say about the scope of Luigi's Mansion 3, the rendering techniques on display are far above anything we saw on the console at launch.

And actually, this brings up an interesting point: generally speaking, consoles are fixed hardware with pretty specific performance boundaries, and developers are not idiots. A lot of what we think of as "squeezing power" out of a console later in it's life is often developers finding clever ways to reduce the overall "scope" of a game to focus the hardware on rendering smaller scale scenes at higher fidelity or lower frame rates.

If we look at the 360 and PS,3 generation, Halo 4 and The Last Of Us were both praised as being late gen graphical showstoppers for their respective consoles. And both games are absolutely stunning. But part of that is to do with the fact that both games had pretty limited sized levels compared to games like Halo 3 or Uncharted 1, and kept a much tighter leash on where players could go and what they could interact with. Limiting the games scopes in that way allowed Naughty Dog and 343 to both go absolutely ham with their engine rendering
 
The game runs near flawlessly and we still have to go through this ugh

Sometimes I feel alien because I can't jive with modern gaming sensibilities at all
 
Yeah the complaints I'm hearing are kinda wild in light of the video kinda raving about how impressive this is.

It's a clear step up in visuals and performance
 
Spyder said:
and that point is complete nonsense

ToTK looks outstanding and putting it on PS5 or whatever isn't going to drastically improve the game to Horizon 2 or Witcher 3 levels like you think
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idk why you're putting words in my mouth. I'm just relaying how I interpreted his post. Simmer down buddy.
Instro said:
Why are people shit posting in a tech thread? If you don't care about performance/visuals, then why are you in this thread to begin with?
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People can still be curious about what DF said like wtf is this lmao.
 
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Is it just me, or is there something special about the lightning system in BotW/TotK? It's simply delightful to the eyes. When combined with its outstanding art style, it makes for one of the most visually stunning games ever made.
 
I cannot believe a game of this magnitude can run on a device that fits in then palm of your hand
 
Dcubed said:
That's my ultimate takeaway here. It's pretty sad that a new console basically reached its full potential with a Wii U port on day 1, but that's the state of modern video game consoles and game development I suppose. What you see on day 1 now reflects the entire future of a console (and the same is also true of PS4, PS5, Xbone and Xbox Series).

The days of game developers squeezing every last drop of juice out of a console over its lifetime as they learn the ins and outs of its hardware are long gone. For better or worse, you will never see the same-console advancements that we used to see back in the days of the 16 & 32 bit eras, or even the PS3/360 generation ever again.
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For some of the older consoles, NES and SNES in particular, a lot of the more impressive later games are the result of the system actually getting more powerful via coprocessors in the cartridge rather than additional optimization. Everyone knows about the Super FX chip, but that's far from the only one that was applied. Some of the later SNES games in particular are basically running on an "SNES Pro" of sorts, via the SA1 chip.
 
Ab said:
Pretty sure they'll send out that patch on release day..
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I know it'll be available to download. Nintendo updates their physical games, especially if they're big, with the latest version on it. That's what I'm waiting for. ;)
 
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Pokemaniac said:
For some of the older consoles, NES and SNES in particular, a lot of the more impressive later games are the result of the system actually getting more powerful via coprocessors in the cartridge rather than additional optimization. Everyone knows about the Super FX chip, but that's far from the only one that was applied. Some of the later SNES games in particular are basically running on an "SNES Pro" of sorts, via the SA1 chip.
Click to expand...

That's true, and the expanded sizes of cartridges over time also made a tremendously huge difference back then too.

But even when comparing like for like, you can see huge gains in performance as developers dug deep into the capabilities of those older machines. Take the Xbox 360 & PS3 for example (which had no such equivilent hardware boost). At the start of their respective lives, you had games like Perfect Dark Zero and Genji 2; which were essentially quickie ports from their respective predecessors. But by the end, you were seeing games like TLOU and Halo 4; which would've been unimaginable when they first launched.

That kind of software familiarity jump just doesn't happen anymore, and that's mostly because consoles (ever since the PS4/Xbone) started being built on off-the-shelf parts that were known quantities and already familiar to developers. Consoles are now essentially just PCs in a box. Even the Switch was based on well known off-the-shelf tech (a standard contemporary ARM CPU and an NVidia GPU directly modelled after the GTX 750 Ti). There aren't any mysteries left for software engineers to solve, today's consoles are simply WYSIWYG; so they're getting maxed out from day 1.
 
Dcubed said:
That's true, and the expanded sizes of cartridges over time also made a tremendously huge difference back then too.

But even when comparing like for like, you can see huge gains in performance as developers dug deep into the capabilities of those older machines. Take the Xbox 360 & PS3 for example (which had no such equivilent hardware boost). At the start of their respective lives, you had games like Perfect Dark Zero and Genji 2; which were essentially quickie ports from their respective predecessors. But by the end, you were seeing games like TLOU and Halo 4; which would've been unimaginable when they first launched.

That kind of software familiarity jump just doesn't happen anymore, and that's mostly because consoles (ever since the PS4/Xbone) started being built on off-the-shelf parts that were known quantities and already familiar to developers. Consoles are now essentially just PCs in a box. Even the Switch was based on well known off-the-shelf tech (a standard contemporary ARM CPU and an NVidia GPU directly modelled after the GTX 750 Ti). There aren't any mysteries left for software engineers to solve, today's consoles are simply WYSIWYG; so they're getting maxed out from day 1.
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I wouldn't say that the machines are being maxed out from day 1 (in certain senses, PS5/XS may never be truly maxed out), but there are a few different things going on. You've got a mix of diminishing returns, consoles that aren't nightmares to develop for, longer development times, and being towards the beginning of a paradigm shift in rendering technology. Earlier titles frequently aren't as unoptimized as they could be, but there's still less obviously visible progression going on.

As new techniques like ray tracing and virtualized geometry begin to be more adopted, the results we'll start seeing from PS5, XS, and the next Switch should improve, but this stuff is still pretty new and being refined, and the old techniques still produce pretty appealing results.
 
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Dcubed said:
Yes, the world in TOTK is larger, but it's not like the game is actually loading or rendering the entire thing all in one go; so it's not exactly taxing the system any more than the original BOTW (hence the same level of performance).
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The level of performance is similar because of optimization, not because the game isn't more computationally demanding without optimization. BOTW is a Wii U game that wasn't designed nor optimized for the Switch. TOTK was designed and optimized for the Switch from the beginning of its development.

And for the record, TOTK renders far more geometry in a given frame than BOTW on average, even with assets being streamed in, and you don't have as many opportunities to occlude geometry when you can skydive from high altitudes. The higher resolution cubemaps are also impacting performance, as are the various calls for physics related events that were not present in BOTW. If you were to attempt to run TOTK with a similar level of optimization as BOTW on the Switch, you would be looking at a slide show the moment you stepped foot in the open world.
 
Dcubed said:
That's true, and the expanded sizes of cartridges over time also made a tremendously huge difference back then too.

But even when comparing like for like, you can see huge gains in performance as developers dug deep into the capabilities of those older machines. Take the Xbox 360 & PS3 for example (which had no such equivilent hardware boost). At the start of their respective lives, you had games like Perfect Dark Zero and Genji 2; which were essentially quickie ports from their respective predecessors. But by the end, you were seeing games like TLOU and Halo 4; which would've been unimaginable when they first launched.

That kind of software familiarity jump just doesn't happen anymore, and that's mostly because consoles (ever since the PS4/Xbone) started being built on off-the-shelf parts that were known quantities and already familiar to developers. Consoles are now essentially just PCs in a box. Even the Switch was based on well known off-the-shelf tech (a standard contemporary ARM CPU and an NVidia GPU directly modelled after the GTX 750 Ti). There aren't any mysteries left for software engineers to solve, today's consoles are simply WYSIWYG; so they're getting maxed out from day 1.
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The diminishing returns are also very real. There is not that much difference between a character having 100,000,000 polygons versus 1,000,000. But going from 100 to 1,000 polygons is a massive jump. There's not so much that can be done.

Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom. already has one of the most advanced lighting systems of any game. With proper global illumination, bounce lighting, color blead. You really can't better there.


That's why games like Last of Us 2 and Red Dead Redemption 2 stopped that race pretty dead on. There's a reason that those games look so good, and it's not pure polygons textures, and lighting. The reason those games still look better than PS5 games, is the animation, which kind of has little to do with hardware. It's just the studios put a ridiculous amount of time into it, that it looks so good. Gone are the days that hardware becomes an end all be all to how a game looks. So not only do we have diminishing returns on hardware, we are also starting to experience another hard cap, and that is manpower. And unless AI gets better than humans, then it's a hard cap.
 
Lozjam said:
The diminishing returns are also very real. There is not that much difference between a character having 100,000,000 polygons versus 1,000,000. But going from 100 to 1,000 polygons is a massive jump. There's not so much that can be done.
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well, raw polygons is one thing. but shading said polygons is another
 
Lozjam said:
Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom. already has one of the most advanced lighting systems of any game. With proper global illumination, bounce lighting, color blead. You really can't better there.
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While it is true that BOTW and TOTK utilize many modern rendering features and visual effects (and not really missing many that other games have), the fidelity of those features and effects matter. Ray tracing and virtualized geometry are becoming standard and have a big impact on visual fidelity, so there is plenty of room for Nintendo to improve on hardware in the future.

To be clear, diminishing returns is real, but I don't think we're quite at the point where people aren't able to tell the difference in rendering quality between TOTK and Fortnite Epic Quality on Unreal Engine 5.2. As long as that difference is appreciable, consumers will adjust their expectations accordingly.
 
Nintendo has a long-ass way from hitting diminishing returns. hell, just having screen space AO would do a lot for Zelda, nevermind ray traced AO
 
ILikeFeet said:
Nintendo has a long-ass way from hitting diminishing returns. hell, just having screen space AO would do a lot for Zelda, nevermind ray traced AO
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TOTK actually does have SSAO and it's more accurate than BOTW's implementation. If you check any area under shadow it's pretty prominent. I did notice a rendering quirk where SSAO is applied in between spaces where geometry obstructs the volumetric light shafts. It isn't as bad in TOTK as it was in BOTW, but it's still there.

I do agree though that there's still plenty of room for Nintendo to improve future hardware and rendering pipelines.
 
I would disagree with it being 30fps 99% of the time. I’ve only played a few hours but come across a good amount of frame drops.

Also this was something I thought in botw and it’s still present in totk, unfortunately but the lack of anisotropic filtering (I think?) is really noticeable.
 
TOTK running more smoothly than BOTW did, while also making room for the extra overhead of the Ultrahand mechanic, and still improving image quality, draw distance, and shadow quality, is itself an example of developers squeezing more juice from the Switch over the years.

Being able to take physics-driven contraptions almost anywhere in the game, including areas that already struggled in BOTW, present an absolutely massive optimization challenge, and the results here are quite remarkable.
 
I think the DF review was great!! I just wish they had talked about the screen space reflections that TotK has, which is not that common in Nintendo games. It looks really good. Other than that missing piece, their analysis was really great.

Also I got surprised they used FSR to achieve 1080p and that the actual resolution does drop to 720p occasionally. It definitely worked really well, if anything because I remember almost all previews saying it was 900p and didn't look like it had any significant dynamic resolution.
 
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ptsousa said:
I can't even think how dafuq Nintendo programmed all this massive multilayered seamless world, physics-heavy game on 3 A57 cores at 1GHz 🧐
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Totally bonkers, right? I'm in awe, really. Even more so than with BotW itself, and that one was amazing already. Magicians!
 
Tonight I skydived from the islands down to the surface of Hyrule for the first time; seeing almost the entire enormous map from the air, then seamlessly dropping down to ground level without so much as a hiccup, on a 6 year old handheld, is downright sorcery.
 
ptsousa said:
I can't even think how dafuq Nintendo programmed all this massive multilayered seamless world, physics-heavy game on 3 A57 cores at 1GHz 🧐
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I'm more impressed that they got it running on what was essentially 3 turbo Wiis ducktaped together (How many Gamecubes would that be? 12?)
 
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