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StarTopic Nintendo Switch Framerates and Resolutions |ST| Running in the 60's

Evil Lucario

Evil Lucario

Star Successor
Welcome to the official catalog detailing every Nintendo Switch first-party games and their framerates and resolutions, alongside select third-parties and indies! As the Switch 2 looms, it's a good excuse to look back at the entire catalog and the general performance of games, as the resource to catalog every single game's framerate and resolution.

The link to the full spreadsheet is down below:

Nintendo Switch Games' Framerate/Resolution - Google Drive

docs.google.com docs.google.com

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Some resolution information is missing as I do not have a super solid way to get resolutions, so some resolutions are left blank. Do note that the spreadsheet will update quicker than the pictures, so check the spreadsheet first before anything else.

More third-party games and indies will come as the sheet is updated - feel free to shoutout your favorite game to add to the list! If anything is wrong or needs updating, feel free to let me know and I will update it as soon as possible.
 
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oh wow much appreciate for the hard work you did on this and im definitely going to save this since i own pretty much a vast majority of the Nintendo first party titles here
 
Ojoloco said:
I think it would also be of interest to put third party games
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bro there's a billion

not really, but the actual number of total releases on the Switch is over 10,000 by this point. Obviously doing every third party isn't tenable, so how would you go about picking and choosing ones to put here?
 
Jersh said:
bro there's a billion

not really, but the actual number of total releases on the Switch is over 10,000 by this point. Obviously doing every third party isn't tenable, so how would you go about picking and choosing ones to put here?
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Instead of putting all the Shovelware of the eshop, put the important thirds franchises, the featured releases, games with a lot of fans and any game that someone voluntarily decides to put around here their link to DF.



About the firsts games, I think they have forgotten to put Tokyo Mirage Sessions and Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3

Info about MUA3:
nintendoeverything.com

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order tech analysis

Nintendo has a big Switch release coming tomorrow in the form of Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order. In its latest video, Digital Foundry examines how it holds up from a technical perspective. When docked, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 can reach up to 1080p. However, the game makes use of...
nintendoeverything.com nintendoeverything.com
 
Ojoloco said:
About the firsts games, I think they have forgotten to put Tokyo Mirage Sessions and Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3
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TMS is missing (not sure how that happened, oops), but rest assured I did not forget about Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3.
Jersh said:
Obviously doing every third party isn't tenable, so how would you go about picking and choosing ones to put here?
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I will be prioritizing Switch exclusives first, from timed exclusives to full exclusives to console exclusives. So games like Harvestella, Triangle Strategy, Monster Hunter Stories 2, Monster Hunter Rise, SMTV, all that. Then bigger third-party games that come to mind like Mortal Kombat 11 and Doom Eternal. After that, it'll be community-driven.

For indie games, I'm prioritizing the ones that made the biggest splashes like Celeste and Hollow Knight, then putting in some of my personal favorites like Blaster Master Zero. Then it'll also be community-driven.
 
Ojoloco said:
Instead of putting all the Shovelware of the eshop, put the important thirds franchises, the featured releases, games with a lot of fans and any game that someone voluntarily decides to put around here their link to DF
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One person's shovelware is another person's comfort game, though. That would be a weird bar to set because what everyone considers shovelware is very subjective.
 
Some of your notation is a little confusing. For example, Breath of the Wild goes up to 900p docked/720p handheld, so labelling it <900p/<720p respectively seems odd to me. You do note that it employs dynamic resolution, but maybe there's a way to be more clear about this?

Digital Foundry also isn't perfect, unfortunately. I believe I've personally verified that even Mario Kart 8 Deluxe uses a dynamic resolution despite their statements to the contrary, and there's even a mod to disable that from happening. It's rare during normal gameplay (and system conditions), but the resolution can and does drop.
 
Tangerine_Cookie said:
One person's shovelware is another person's comfort game, though. That would be a weird bar to set because what everyone considers shovelware is very subjective.
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There‘s a objective definition: shovelware are all games which aren‘t Nintendo games. I‘m looking forward to seeing Xbox putting all their shovelware on Switch 2.
 
this is rad, very useful.

Bowser's Fury is still such a weird game to me because it looks like the only time Nintendo ever needed to do something as drastic as "yeah, docked is shooting for 60 but we're just gonna hard cap it at 30 in handheld" and they did it for a Mario game of all things; makes me wonder if Bowser's Fury was originally meant to be a Switch Pro-exclusive before that got cancelled and they handed off a prototype to NST

Also, is it worth noting when some games (off the top of my head, Splatoon 2 and 3 and I think Yoshi's Crafted World) use a 30fps cap just for their hubs/overworld menus?
 
Very useful thread, thank you.

It’s really interesting that Nintendo has been constantly looking for ways to improve performance throughout the Switch lifecycle. Whether it’s the use of FSR, the flexibility needed for Bowser Fury to remain a stable experience or the upscaling solution specific to Xenoblade 3, they really succeed in making the most of the possibilities of their hardware.

To be honest, I really hope that we can benefit from a performance improvement of some games via backward compatibility. I don’t want to buy Xenoblade or Bayonetta or Open World Zelda collections exclusive to the Switch 2 only to benefit from a better resolution and a better framerate for games I already own.
 
Jersh said:
Some of your notation is a little confusing. For example, Breath of the Wild goes up to 900p docked/720p handheld, so labelling it <900p/<720p respectively seems odd to me. You do note that it employs dynamic resolution, but maybe there's a way to be more clear about this?

Digital Foundry also isn't perfect, unfortunately. I believe I've personally verified that even Mario Kart 8 Deluxe uses a dynamic resolution despite their statements to the contrary, and there's even a mod to disable that from happening. It's rare during normal gameplay (and system conditions), but the resolution can and does drop.
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After sleeping on it, I'll probably go include the full dynamic resolution in the columns, with the notes talking about where it generally hovers around.

Some dynamic resolution I intentionally left out, though. Super Mario Bros. Wonder, for example, basically only seems to do it on the World Map in very select cases which barely matters. The same for double-buffer Vsync causing crashes to 30fps, which I've seen in official gameplay clips from Nintendo but haven't seen myself in online gameplay with friends.

Funnily enough about Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, this just jogged my memory where once Digital Foundry got their portable capture unit, they looked at MK8D again and saw that had dynamic resolution in handheld mode. Did it also happen in docked in your experience?
 
It is impressive to see how many titles at least tried to hit the full 900p / 1080p. Bodes well for Switch 2 first-party titles aiming for a high 1440p / full 4K with DLSS.
 
Yoshi’s Crafted World is only ~576p in TV Mode?! That feels…wrong, and very odd. I dunno, maybe it is right, but I feel like that’s something that I would have noticed while playing the game but it didn’t really seem much lower than 720p to me…

Also, for games with dynamic resolution, you’re using the less-than sign (<), but shouldn’t it be the less-than-or-equal-to sign (≤) instead? Otherwise the implication is that a game listed as “<1080p” never actually hits 1080p, but I don’t believe that’s the case here, correct?
 
Thank you everyone for the feedback and warm reception! I'm going to learn how to pixel count so I can fill in on some of the games I own, like Fire Emblem Three Houses and Another Code: Recollection, and get working on the third-party games tonight.
Tye said:
Yoshi’s Crafted World is only ~576p in TV Mode?! That feels…wrong, and very odd. I dunno, maybe it is right, but I feel like that’s something that I would have noticed while playing the game but it didn’t really seem much lower than 720p to me…

Also, for games with dynamic resolution, you’re using the less-than sign (<), but shouldn’t it be the less-than-or-equal-to sign (≤) instead? Otherwise the implication is that a game listed as “<1080p” never actually hits 1080p, but I don’t believe that’s the case here, correct?
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I double checked the Digital Foundry video (I was using their articles when making this spreadsheet) and there are times it can hit 675p docked, but never 720p. But the depth-of-field and general softness on real world materials help mask the low resolution just enough, if you ask me.

As for dynamic resolution, that's correct. I'll be overhauling that section after I finish getting third-party and indie games noted, and they will use the new way of showing dynamic resolution where it'll just display the resolution range in the column, and more notes would detail what that means.
 
Evil Lucario said:
Funnily enough about Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, this just jogged my memory where once Digital Foundry got their portable capture unit, they looked at MK8D again and saw that had dynamic resolution in handheld mode. Did it also happen in docked in your experience?
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Docked is harder for me to verify as I don't have a capture card (or even a native 1080p set) to view the raw output with. Handheld I was able to just spot the resolution dropping with a specific repeatable setup; I'll see if I can manage that docked, though it might take me a bit (don't expect it today or tomorrow). Regardless, without a capture card I can't properly pixel count, only verify that the resolution is or isn't changing.
 
Thanks for making this, appreciate the effort

Would you happen to have example footage of Super Mario Bros. Wonder scaling down from 1080p? I might rerecord in ProRes for analysis
 
The next update is here! Added all of the third-party games I could immediately think of, but there are no handy lists for third-party Switch exclusives, so I will be slowly chipping away at more games to add. Feel free to suggest your favorite game if it's not on the list! It does not need to be exclusive, like Mega Man 11 or Mortal Kombat 11.

Next update, I will be overhauling the resolution columns for first-party games to reflect what it currently looks like in the third-party section.
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BlackthornOrion said:
this is rad, very useful.

Bowser's Fury is still such a weird game to me because it looks like the only time Nintendo ever needed to do something as drastic as "yeah, docked is shooting for 60 but we're just gonna hard cap it at 30 in handheld" and they did it for a Mario game of all things; makes me wonder if Bowser's Fury was originally meant to be a Switch Pro-exclusive before that got cancelled and they handed off a prototype to NST

Also, is it worth noting when some games (off the top of my head, Splatoon 2 and 3 and I think Yoshi's Crafted World) use a 30fps cap just for their hubs/overworld menus?
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I'll throw in a note there, since I have notes about framerate changes elsewhere like cinematics dropping to 30fps and etc.

Jersh said:
Docked is harder for me to verify as I don't have a capture card (or even a native 1080p set) to view the raw output with. Handheld I was able to just spot the resolution dropping with a specific repeatable setup; I'll see if I can manage that docked, though it might take me a bit (don't expect it today or tomorrow). Regardless, without a capture card I can't properly pixel count, only verify that the resolution is or isn't changing.
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So it turns out that I completely misremembered and I was thinking of Breath of the Wild having dynamic resolution in handheld. My apologies. I will make a note about dynamic resolution regardless.

burningup said:
Thanks for making this, appreciate the effort

Would you happen to have example footage of Super Mario Bros. Wonder scaling down from 1080p? I might rerecord in ProRes for analysis
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Digital Foundry has something for that (timestamp 11:14):

 
neil said:
This is really cool, thanks OP. Did you test these yourself or find the info on the web?

I'm making a gaming encyclopaedia site that can archive and present data like this. There's a blog post about it at https://blog.dbljump.com/2023/02/28/new-game-version-comparison-features if anyone wants to give it a try (sorry for self-promoting)
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I'm actually relatively resolution blind (on both my 1440p monitor and 4K TV, I can't super tell the difference between 900p and 1080p) so that was basically just Digital Foundry's testing all in one place with only a couple of other things from elsewhere like Monster Hunter Stories 2, Kirby Star Allies docked resolution, and Origami King. Eventually, I will learn how to pixel count so I can fill out the rest, like Three Houses. I also don't own every game, so I could only look at YouTube videos for stuff to determine the framerate. For example, I didn't know that Monster Hunter Stories 2 was actually an unlocked framerate until I went frame-by-frame in some videos in certain enclosed environments.

That said, framerates are pretty easy to tell if it's 30 or 60 so that's not too bad. It's resolution that's a nightmare and would need community sourcing to fill out the spreadsheet.
 
It's going to be extremely satisfying to go back to this with new Switch 2 columns to compare all improvements. Yes I'm hopeful!
 
Impressive thread!! Truly the Lord’s Work, OP. For too long, sections of the gaming community have spread lies about “crap hardware” and “540p 20FPS” performance as a general thing on the Switch, rather than acknowledge a single bad performance as just that. The misinformation machine is real, and it matters that those who are uncertain or ignorant have possession of the facts. A bad port isn’t indicative of the hardware’s capacity, and doesn’t consider the other variables at play. This will be worth bookmarking as receipts. 💕✨
 
New update: dynamic resolution now has the full range in all columns! The pictures in the OP are also updated. And as always, click the link to check out the third-party and indie games, of which I added a couple more.

Now for the hard part: pixel counting the resolutions for everything else. Unfortunately I do see most of the resolutions remaining blank for the time being, but at least framerates are all clear as day.
 
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