No Man’s Sky Switch tech analysis, including frame rate and resolution

Digital Foundry has taken a closer look at the Switch version of No Man’s Sky, including frame rate and resolution. While it’s great to have the game on Switch, it seems that a number of sacrifices were made to get things running. Digital Foundry points out aggressive draw in, a somewhat unstable performance, and more.

Here are some of the notable tidbits:

– Aggressive draw in used on Switch for virtually all screen elements
– Big chunks of level geometry snap into place at close distances
– Huge areas of shadow map coverage crudely draw in as the player nears
– Larger foliage elements render out reasonably far
– Bushes and small plants only show up very close to the player
– Assets are often low quality
– Volumetric clouds look simple and low-res
– Character animation operates at reduced rates not far from the player
– Some of the low res shadow maps at medium distances flicker
– TAA used but the coverage apparently isn’t great as many elements have sharp jagged edges
– Image seems to flicker at all times with distracting pixel movement and geometric edges
– No Man’s Sky has a resolution of 1152×648 on Switch when docked
– Portable mode drops to 896×504
– Outside of image quality, docked and portable modes are similar
– No Man’s Sky frame rate targets 30 FPS on Switch
– When walking around, the game hits this mark
– There are relatively frequent frame rate drops
– Stuttering when transitioning between planets and space
– Worst case scenario happens with base building as you crank up the complexity which causes the game’s frame rate to tank and essentially crash

Check out the full analysis from Digital Foundry below for more on No Man’s Sky’s performance on Switch, including frame rate and resolution.