Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, Game Freak’s 2022 mainline Pokémon games, had infamously poor visuals. Rudimentary lighting, low-res textures and stiff animation afflicted these open-world efforts, while performance dropped below the 30fps target nearly constantly and image quality also suffered. Technically, they were a failure by any reasonable standard, even on the power-constrained OG Switch console. Now the Switch 2 is here and these games have the potential to run significantly better – but what changes does the free Switch 2 upgrade Nintendo is offering actually deliver?
The largest visual difference in Scarlet and Violet on Switch 2 lies in image quality. The original game ran between 720p and 1080p in docked mode, and about 576p to 720p portably, without anti-aliasing treatment of any kind. That wouldn’t be too offensive-looking necessarily for a game with a relatively small scale, but for an open world with vast views and plenty of ultra-fine details to resolve, it was a nightmare scenario. The updated version benefits from clean, temporally-treated visuals in comparison, with a vastly more stable rendition of its world. The game looks genuinely quite solid now in image quality terms, and even holds up well on a 4K television set. Shimmering is mostly a thing of the past, and aliasing artifacts are generally absent, especially in still shots.
The actual resolution counts are still reasonably low, with a 1080p internal resolution for docked play (without DRS) and a ~648p figure for handheld play (with DRS) scaled up to 1080p. Both modes seem to use a relatively cheap form of DLSS in performance terms, based on characteristic image breakup on moving objects we’ve observed in other Switch 2 titles like Fast Fusion. That means image quality can dip in more challenging scenes, but given the relatively sedate pace of Pokémon, it still marks a huge improvement in final image quality, especially in the sharper docked mode.
The other obvious visual improvement comes down to frame-rate. Violet’s Switch 1 incarnation was an infamously poor performer, often hanging in the mid-20s during open-world exploration. Cutscenes often ran even worse, and the game would occasionally hang with a long frame-time spike. I’ve seen worse performers on Switch, but the combination of crude visuals and poor frame-rates in a Switch-exclusive game was exceptional.