I've been annoying a lot of Switch fans in comment sections lately by saying 20fps and 480p in the year 2020 is unacceptable, no matter how portable a game is. I get that people without media rooms or with long commutes or whatever love the Switch's portability. I'm happy for them. However when they accept 20fps games, that drop to 480p resolution or even lower, I think it's baffling (and sets a bad precedent).

Crysis is the latest example, though there are many others. Crysis attempts 720p but frequent drops to 480p. Wolfenstein dropped to 360p! These games also shoot for 30fps (which itself isn't good for a shooter), but drop to 20 of even lower during combat. To me, these numbers are well beyond what is acceptable. It's not even borderline.

So my question is... do you have a bare minimum of performance you accept? Or is portability (or another factor like price) more important than any technical aspect?

If specific comments on Deadly Premonition 2 are anything to go by, then even single-digit framerate can be "part of the charming experience".

For PC games for me it's the standard 1080p/60. But If the question is "For mobile ports of PC games, are you willing to accept lower performance / make allowances on portable devices?", I don't personally own a Switch but for mobile gaming in general, I'd rather play game genres more suited to touchscreen optimized devices (puzzle, point & click, ScummVM for Android, etc) with decent battery life than trying to shoehorn badly running heavyweight PC games like Crysis running at single-digit frame-rates.

In fact, I've never really liked "mobile FPS" enough to want to benchmark any purely because I find the controls, small 5-6" screen sizes and general experience rubbish. Eg, even if it ran at 144fps, trying to play dark stealth FPS games like Thief outside with the sun shining down on a glossy screen with some kid screaming a few feet away on the bus / train really doesn't sound like fun even if there were a Switch version of it for £0.50. I'd rather save immersive / heavier PC games for a nice 27-32" screen in the evening and save lighter weight battery friendly "casual" genres for mobile gaming and keep them separate like that, which generally tends to eliminate mobile performance issues.

Look, they can't even get their second parties to hit acceptable performance targets, like Pokemon.

Though admittedly, I have no idea how the hell Pokemon passed the certification in the first place.

How big a resolution is a must depends on the game but going below 40 F/s in a shooter is just awful.

Thankfully I brought a gpd win 2!

720p 30FPS is in general what I can deal with on consoles, but only if the performance is consistent (i.e. no frequent major drops, no framepacing issues, etc) on modern games.

That said, I also agree that my mins are pretty unacceptable and I definitely wouldn't accept it on PC. In the case of something like the Switch, I'd rather have lower graphics with better performance than better graphics with lower performance, but in general it seems like the wider gaming public prefer a spectacle even if it's in a slideshow. There are some games the system just can't handle in a way that's usable but there's a large chunk of switch fans whom seem to fervently defend the handheld's honor.

EDIT: Like, look, I can definitely get the convenience of handheld mode or cheaper buy-in price for some games and being willing to put up with less than optimal results for that convenience, but even then, it's like you have to admit the performance is ass in a lot of multiplats esp. in handheld mode. It's fine if someone can put up with it but it doesn't make it good, nor should someone get mad when somebody points out its bad.

I think the Switch portable screen is 720p native, so 720p at 30fps seems like a reasonable target to me. I mean, as a PC guy even 30fps is criminally low IMO, especially for a shooter, but I know on console it is very acceptable. Drops to 20fps or lower during combat though? Drops in resolution to sub-SD? I just don't understand why they accept it.

Like AB2012 though, I'm not the target market. Even if I was on vacation or something I'd rather just wait until I got home to play Crysis in a better way, and I'd play Lumines or something.

That might as well be the charming experience tbh. The first game was "quirky" too, technically speaking.

Any news on Dark Souls' switch port? How's the framerate in... you know... THAT part?

Depends on the game, genre and what level of graphics it has.

For many genres and types of games, I can live with solid 30 fps, but if it is a fast-based FPS shooter, then 60 fps is definitely preferable (like when I am playing Team Fortress 2; I rather even lower the resolution from 1920x1080 (down to even 1280x720) and/or disable some graphical effects, if that yields me solid 60 fps. I don't have a 120 or 144Hz monitor so I have no clue if I'd even prefer such high fps counts over 60 fps.

As for resolution, depends on the quality of textures, how high the polygon count is etc. If you take e.g. some old game like System Shock 2, pushing the graphics to e.g. 1920x1080 doesn't really improve the graphics at all compared to e.g. 1280x720 (or 1024x768), as the extra pixels don't really add any details to the graphics. All that the higher resolution does it so make the user-interface and text too small to read.

With a game like The Witcher 3, I might find 30 fps passable if it is needed to make the graphics better. There I find it more important that the scenery and characters look better, than that the game would run on solid 60 fps.

Need to get that hot Geralt booty in full glory during his bath scene right?

Digital Foundry looked at this recently and discovered it was not the case. The original 360 game ran at 30fps pretty consistently.

Welcome to the never-ending (i.e., never exploding) graphic realism bubble... just another gimmick by the HW market to keep us spending money on overpriced devices.

720p was the tits a decade ago, they even called it HD. Now, according to them, 1080p is lame and 60 fps is slow... (of course, they wanna us to buy those 60inch 4k@144hz monitors). They're so shameless right now they didn't even hold their next step: 8k. Instead of focusing in true game changers like augmented reality and virtual headsets.

However, Moore's law is a bitch and it''s coming back to bite them in the ass so they wanna repeat the whole thing but now in the 'portable' realm. I'll bet you two GOG games that next year they announce the Nintendo Switch Pro and those 20fps are going to be 25fps... you gotta get on with the tide boy </sarcasm>.

If using Switch as portable, then 480p is fine because of the small screen, it looks almost as good as 720p. As for min FPS, it depends on the game. Most casual commute players will not be playing FPShooters. They mostly play casual, low intensity games on the go, like Animal Crossing. Which would be fine at 20fps. Same goes for casual rpgs, puzzle, strategy, visual novel, mobile ports, etc. For FPshooters, then it really need to be optimized to a min of 30fps to be enjoyable.

Depends on where you played the first game. While the PS3/Switch versions don't have the best performance and the PC version is a technical mess, the original Xbox 360 version runs fine.

As for Dark Souls, Blighttown is fixed.