Anyway, digital foundry did their Splatoon 2 video. Seems the game uses dynamic resolution and falls out of 1080p a lot. Hopefully they fix that and make it stay more in the 1080. But the best news is that while playing the game you're at a constant 60 fps. Unless you're in the hub, which runs at 30 FPS because I guess it's a hub?
Anyway, here's the video.
Assuming the hub world is where players can gather and see each other, then it's going to be significantly more CPU limited than the game world making it far more difficult to achieve 60 FPS. They also want to maintain 1080p there as the hub world is one where a person can linger and take a close look at the game, unlike in game mode where the action can be frantic and fast paced leaving little time to just sit there and look at your surroundings.
Speaking of which. Huge huge kudos to the Splatoon team for achieving locked 60 FPS. 60 FPS (IMO) is far more important than resolution, especially in fast motion. I hope all games in the future go for a locked framerate with variable resolution, although I doubt this will happen. Unlike the hub world, the game world features fast paced action and hence a drop in resolution will be less noticeable. Ideally you'd want to keep resolution constant, but there are people that would argue that if you did that, then you'd be wasting GPU resources. Either way, 60 FPS and variable resolution is massively better than 1080p with drops in framerate.
That said, the lack of AA is disappointing. Most people aren't as sensitive to aliasing in games as I am, so this will stick out like a sore thumb to me (one of the major reasons PS3/X360 games were so much worse on console than PC beyond the fact that most were also limited to 30 FPS). However, it's understandable considering the limited hardware. I still would have loved to see some AA.
Then again, when I think about it maybe not so much. If we look at Mario + Rabbids, it appears to feature AA that is decent at removing the jagged appearance of aliasing. Unfortunately it seems to come at a cost of massive blur across the entire scene. Hopefully that isn't the actual case and maybe the capture method was at fault (faint hope). But if the choice here was between a blur heavy AA method or no AA with a clear picture, I'd reluctantly choose no AA with a clear picture.
All in all, it looks like they did a fantastic job with Splatoon. It is in all ways a rather massive improvement over the Wii-U version. They could have instead used that GPU power to have a stable 1080p, but variable resolution as a tradeoff for greater visual fidelity is the right choice to make, IMO. Resolution is relatively unimportant as long as it doesn't go down to something ridiculously low.
In other words, people are much more likely to notice the improvement in the graphics rather than the fact that it isn't always 1080p. Almost no one will notice the variable resolution.
PS - is there a text version that accompanies the video? I really REALLY dislike video only reviews/analysis of games.
[edit] I'm also starting to like the Switch far more than the PS4/XBO due to one simple thing. Nintendo's focus on 60 FPS. As the video states over 80% of the games currently on the switch are 60 FPS game, YAY. Granted many of them are smaller indie titles. But the fact that outside of Zelda (an incredibly ambitious titles) all of Nintendo's first party games have been 60 FPS makes me hope that all of Nintendo's future titles will also be locked 60 FPS games. For me that is huge as I dislike playing 30 FPS games a LOT. Give me 60 FPS over resolution and meaningless graphical bling (which always ends up looking horrible at 30 FPS) any day of the week.
Regards,
SB