Arkham

With Nintendo Switch 2 arriving with us just a day before release, there’s little time for Digital Foundry to put together any kind of comprehensive coverage – but there are a number of system features I was curious to test out, none more important than backwards compatibility. Would Switch 2 improve performance running Switch 1 games? The first game I tested was Batman: Arkham Knight, described by DF’s Oliver Mackenzie as “the worst performing software I have reviewed to date at Digital Foundry”. 18 months on he says it still is – but the good news is that Switch 2 fixes all of its performance issues, at times doubling performance. Put simply, Switch 1 games do run better on Switch 2.

Batman: Arkham Knight is a game with a long and storied history for Digital Foundry, not least because of its highly compromised PC version, which was so bad it was pulled from sale before returning in an improved but still poor shape. The Switch version though – I played it for the first time today on original hardware and it remains the same “unmitigated disaster” we reported on back in December 2023. We’ve talked a lot about “impossible ports” for the Switch and we’ve seen games like Doom Eternal arrive on the console in compromised form, but still delivering a good experience overall. Batman: Arkham Knight on Switch is anything but.

For the purposes of our testing though, this actually makes for an interesting challenge for Switch 2 backwards compatibility as the evidence suggests that Arkham Knight pushes all system components beyond tolerable limits. Graphically, the game is rich and detailed, pushing a lot of detail in its characters and open world. Meanwhile, the fact that it is an open world means that the CPU is pushed hard streaming in and decompressing data. And finally, gigantic stutters found in the Switch port suggest that storage is also stressed.

The end result is astonishingly poor. There are graphical compromises that Switch 2 can never fix – dramatically poorer textures and no anti-aliasing whatsoever – but what’s truly remarkable is just how bad performance is. Based on measurements of capture taken today, Switch’s stuttering problems extend to 180ms frame-times hitting the user in rapid succession, often depressing performance under 20fps but feeling a lot worse. Driving sections in particular are borderline unplayable. The 30fps frame-rate cap is almost advisory in nature.

Going into our Switch 2 testing, we’d received no real indication from Nintendo on whether back-compat would actually be any faster than running the game on original hardware. Wii titles didn’t run any better on Wii U, for example. However, Switch 2 is different. It’s not using full hardware backwards compatibility as such – it’s effectively using a translation layer to run the original game code on the new system. In this scenario, it would probably be a lot harder to limit games to original performance levels as opposed to just letting the new system run those titles with whatever system resources the Switch 2 can throw at them.

The end result is that – remarkably – Batman: Arkham Knight is as fixed as it can be on Switch 2 without going back to the game and optimising it. While the game still possesses ugly pared back textures and hideous aliasing problems, it runs as flawlessly as it’s possible with the original code. Extra CPU and GPU power in combination with the faster storage are effectively brute-forcing the game to be everything it can possibly be, given the design constraints placed on the original code. Is it perfect? Well, in Batmobile driving, while frame-rate is fixed, animation error hoves into view, so despite a locked 30fps, something still doesn’t look right. Meanwhile, my colleague Oliver Mackenzie had the game crash on Switch 2 simply by pausing it.

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Extra horsepower is clearly there, however and this sets the scene for a more detailed Digital Foundry investigation into backwards compatibility on the Switch 2 system, but based on initial testing, I feel there’s grounds for profound optimism here. Take The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, for example. It’s another port that truly pushed Switch hard. We’d argue that in many ways it’s as good as you could possibly get for the older hardware – but developer Saber Interactive used every trick in the book to get the game running, and there are problems.

Settlements like Novigrad push CPU hard even on PC and more powerful consoles and it’s clearly struggling on Switch. Meanwhile, image quality struggles as the game leans heavily into dynamic resolution scaling. Looking very quickly at the game running on Switch 2 and Novigrad is running at 30 frames per second locked.

Arkham Knight and The Witcher 3 are our go-to titles for testing Switch 2 backwards compatibility performance enhancements – and initial impressions are positive. What isn’t quite so positive is that on the handheld screen, you’re still getting the handheld versions of Switch 1 games designed for a native 720p screen – meaning that every game will be upscaled to 1080p in what looks like a very basic technique that doesn’t look great. We’re probably asking for too much here but the option to force original Switch games to run in their docked modes would clearly improve matters on games that aren’t reliant on handheld-specific features, like the touchscreen support in Mario Maker, for example, and could potentially address the scaling problem.

We’ll be reporting back with more Switch 2 backwards compatibility testing soon.

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