Video: Digital Foundry’s Technical Analysis Of Dying Light On Switch

Dying Light Platinum Edition arrives on the Nintendo Switch next week, and ahead of its release, the tech experts over at Digital Foundry have shared their own technical review of the game.

So, has Techland succeeded with the Switch port? In docked mode, the survival horror game runs at 1080p and 720p in handheld mode, but there’s a bit of a catch:

“Techland is using what seems to be a new TAAU feature – temporal anti-aliasing with upscaling. The idea here is to reconstruct the image over several frames to match the target output resolution: either 1080p in docked or 720p in portable. Naturally, the actual base resolution is lower, often counting around or below 720p in docked mode, but the result is interesting: it looks reasonably close to native when standing still but as you move, you’ll notice some image break-up.”

On the performance front, Dying Light on Switch is running at an uncapped framerate of 30-36fps, which isn’t the best at times:

“On paper, this may not seem like a big deal, but what’s happening is that we’re basically seeing inconsistent frame-times of 16ms, 33ms and 50ms – and this results in inconsistent motion. It’s like incorrect frame-pacing but slightly different in how it manifests, creating a slightly jerky look to the action.”

“There are genuine drops beneath 30fps – in the city at night, for example… if Techland can implement a decent 30fps cap, this should make the game look and feel smoother overall.”

Fortunately, the framerate stays “above 30fps” most of the time – and apparently, Techland is even looking into a patch to resolve this issue.

Overall, though, Digital Foundry says Dying Light on Switch is an “intelligently designed port” that holds up, and is “a lot more appealing” in handheld mode.

Will you be checking out this game when it arrives on the Switch next week? Comment down below.