Obviously the original Switch was not powerful enough for TSW - or any game really - but the Switch 2's confirmed leaked specs make TSW on it a much more plausible proposition. The CPU is roughly equivalent to the ones found in the PS4 and Xbox One, which is a terrible start for normal games. However, TSW almost runs on the PS4 and Xbox One anyway. The Switch will have 12GB of RAM which is not enough, but is more than the PS4 and Xbox One versions have to offer. Weirdly, the Switch 2 will have ray tracing support which TSW wouldn't use, but I hope that the extra performance from the GPU section of the SOC can mean the console would run marginally TSW better than the poor PS4 and Xbox One versions. The on-board storage is rumoured to be 256GB which won't be any good for TSW, but it's much better than the tiny amount of storage on the original Switch. The specs aren't confirmed, but as with most Switch 2 leaks it's more than likely true. We'll need to wait for official information on the specs for us and DTG to make a judgement on whether TSW on the Switch 2 is possible. However, my guess at the moment is that TSW could have two performance modes: 1080p with an uncapped framerate that I expect would hover around 45fps, or upscaled 1440p (using the Switch 2's on board upscaling engine which will look unbelievably ugly like every other upscaling system) at a capped 30fps. I am absolutely certain that the PS4 and Xbox One versions of TSW run at 900p or 720p when running in HD mode, because there is no way a 1080p game can look that bad. My hope is that a Switch 2 port could actually run TSW in 1080p. That's a resolution that stopped being the industry standard in 2016, but that's more of a comment on the Switch 2 rather than DTG. As usual with Nintendo, the Switch 2 is woefully underpowered and overpriced, but everyone on the planet will buy one on the day it comes out because obviously we all want to play Mario Kart 9. Embarrassingly, I probably will too.
You can have the most powerful PC out there and this game still has issues running and looking good. The hardware is not the problem its the devs being able to optimize the game and scale for different hardware.
If TSW in any form would come to the Switch 2, which I'll be getting anyway, it'd be a day one purchase for me. I'd be quite happy with a TSW 4 or even just TSW 3 port so to speak. I don't need nor do I want to get a Steam Deck just for that. The new Joycons seem to be able to act as mice with their optical sensors, so it'll be perfect for RTS, city building or train simulation, at home maybe, but even more in table mode while on long train trips, so it has potential. In fact, I see so much potential, if ports of a certain big JRPG Series that started out on Nintendo consoles decades ago, particularly the remake Series of its seventh installment, I'd sell my PS5 since that's the only reason I got it in the first place, just keep my PC, the PS3 and the XBOX One. Even if it's a stripped version of TSW with reduced services etc. I wouldn't mind. Also it could unlock a new market and it would play right into the target demographic for the TTTE DLC. So maybe a port with say Thomas and an Isle of Sodor map would hit pretty big I suppose. It'll never run the current game or TSW 6, sure, but on that particular console it doesn't need to for me, any version is better than a missed opportunity. As long as it doesn't affect the "full" versions for PC, XBOX and PS I'd be fine and quite happy with any development. That's my two cents on that matter and sorry for possible incoherence, I just got up.
This game runs like absolute arse on an RTX 4090. It's truly not a matter of hardware. More powerful hardware can only brute force so much for diminishing returns when it comes to TSW. I have ZERO faith in their ability to optimise it for Switch 2 when they've proven incapable of doing so for any other fixed hardware platform.
Surprised to hear that and have to say it runs mostly fine on my (self-assembled) 4090-based PC. What CPU are you pairing it with? Is it a prebuilt system?
Other consoles can barely handle Tsw 5, not to mention a switch has ways less performance, so it would maybe crash before you are in the menu screen. Or explode...
We're talking about the Switch 2 here. The performance is believed to be slightly better than a PS4. Not good enough for normal games, but so has every console Nintendo has made after they gave up with the Wii. The Wii U being the only exception, as for a very short amount of time it was the most powerful console. Anyway, TSW sort of runs on the PS4, so while a Switch 1 port is impossible, a Switch 2 port is far more reasonable to expect. DTG do have a market for it; the original Switch sold so many units Sony had to pretend that they'd magically sold 5 million extra PlayStation 2s.
Well, I have a 3080 and the game runs pretty well apart from an occasional hitch or stutter. I think a system is more than just the GPU. I actually switched from a 4k monitor to a 1440 curved widescreen and I like it much better. I do agree that the game is poorly optimized. So many people have issues with graphics and gameplay it can't all be down to hardware. Anyway my issues with TSW are content related rather than performance.. Having said that, I'd give my right arm for a 4090. Of course, now that the 50xx is on the market, we'll all want one of those. Probably costs an arm and a leg. I remember 20 years ago, I bought a super- duper PC for $499 and it ran MSTS so beautifully I still shed a tear when I think of it. ( Sorry for drifting off course. )
Well until we know the exact specs of the system we can't really say whether or not it could run natively, however cloud gaming is an option which would allow the game to run from a server like Hitman 3.
My dad got one 40 years ago for about that, would be 2 grand in today's money. 64KB of RAM, 16KB of VRAM, a 4MHz Z80...
The hitching an stuttering is caused by the way the world is streamed into RAM - Unreal Engine is notoriously bad at this, which is why other games find ways to chop worlds into smaller bits, and design levels so that you don't notice the loading of the next bit. For example, all that crawling through tight spaces and being forced to take elevators that crawl along in Jedi: Survivor and Jedi: Fallen Order, lets Unreal Engine in those games stream in the next block of the world without you noticing the slowdown (it's there, but you don't notice it). A game like TSW doesn't have the luxury of designing worlds like this: they have to show the world far ahead, and stream it in as you coast through it at relatively high speed. This will fore the engine to halt gameplay as it streams the world that lies just beyond your visibility threshold. It's not really fair to blame DTG for this. Blame Unreal Engine instead.
I mean, one can blame their engine choice, for a task it's particularly ill-suited to. And certainly can blame the methods with which they work with the engine too, since a handful of studios have been able to overcome its failings in these specific areas, but that requires some deep level reworkings of a lot of fundamentals of the engine. Fundamentally, they went with something that provided the visuals they wanted and the accessibility and ease of hiring people with familiarity, at a significantly lower price point that they were able to afford, certainly vs building something bespoke suited directly to the task, and this is the compromised result. A game that's a stutterfest with regular drops below 60 on dialled back settings at 1440p on hardware that will quite smoothly give reasonably paced triple digit framerates when using maximum RT/Pathtraced settings on stuff like CP77, Indiana Jones, Outlaws, Frontiers of Pandora, or Senua's Saga. And sure, I can see Switch 2 running TSW. Though it would absolutely aggravate the "8th gen is holding TSW back" crowd who seem to have a misdirected sense of what causes the game's problems, if DTG committed to another 8 years of supporting that version.
There's not a lot to choose from. Other engines struggle to load assets on wide viewplanes too, perhaps not as bad as UE does. But other than MS' in-house engine used to Flight Simulator (which was very expensive to develop, and relies on cloud infrastructure to do much of its calculations), I don't really see the better choice. Couple that, as you say, with the ease of development in UE, and the ease of finding hires that are already familiar with that engine, and I totally understand why they went with UE. Performance wise, UE scales pretty good on older hardware, but at a cost (of course). Hogwart's Legacy, for example, is a total mess on Switch (not just in graphics, which is to be expected, but in performance too). Quite a few UE games were not ported to Switch because of this. Switch 2 is rumoured to have an NVidia Tegra Orin SoC, that contains a GPU based on NVidia's Ampere architecture (dating from the GTX30xx era), possibly updated to support temporal frame generation natively (although on the PC side of things, apps like Lossless Scaling have demonstrated that you don't really need dedicated hardware for that). The Orin, as available off the shelve from NVidia, contains 2048 CUDA cores and 64 Tensor cores and comes in packages including 4GB all the way up to 64GB of unified (V)RAM.That puts it somewhere around the performance level of laptop models of the RTX 3050. If temporal frame generation is included, you could comfortably run TSW on 1080P on Switch 2. If not - I don't think it would run SW acceptably. If NVidia makes a special version of the SoC just for Nintendo, they could of course up the core count considerably. Advancements in chip design can make a RTX 3060 level GPU in a handheld a possibility, by using a 4 nm design instead of the 8 nm that the existing RTX 30xx chips are produced in. But that chip would prove to be very expensive, as it would have to be newly engineered, and hard to keep within an acceptable power envelope for a device like the Switch 2. Otherwise it would throttle like madness if it gets too hot, and drain your battery, I reckon.
I dunno, I can't see DTG wanting to add an eighth build of the game for a system that's seemingly expected to be on par with the 8th gen systems that they already have to specially tailor builds for just to make them work acceptably. Unless they get market research showing demand for this game on a Switch 2 is so high that they'd be foolish not to do it, which I can't imagine.
Im starting to think lately that Gen 8 isn't the Problem. The main thing that is holding TSW back is how poorly optimized the game is... In fact isn't terrible optimization holding all of gaming back in the first place...
They're already probably going to be sticking some hefty constraints on clock speeds just from what we know about the architecture the T239 shares with the T234. Battery drain and heat generation pretty much increases exponentially as you linearly increase speed so they are going to try and keep it to a sweet spot that balances performance and battery life.
If DTG set a target with TSW on the PS4 and Xbox One and tried to achieve it, that would be a good start. A consistent 30fps at 1080p would be more than enough for the standard consoles, although it may be harder to achieve on the Xbox One. The PS4 Pro version could have a choice between 1080p at a higher framerate (45?) or 30fps at a slightly higher resolution (2048x1152 perhaps). The Xbox One X has a bit more grunt than the PS4 Pro. I still think it's unwise to offer a 4K mode on the pro consoles because it doesn't improve the framerate, but a 1440p mode on the Xbox One X is plausible I think. If I had the choice though, I'd use a 1080p60 mode.
If DTG can make money off something, they will shoehorn their games onto it one way or another. Have you seen all the shovelware in the Nintendo eShop lately? One more rushed, broken and poorly optimized piece of trash that struggles to maintain 30fps isn't going to crash Nintendo's storefront. I'd bet DTG have had Nintendo Switch 2 development kits in their offices for months already.
