If you’ve been contemplating an upgrade to the Nintendo Switch 2 and happen to be a dedicated enthusiast of the Pokemon series, the latest insights from Digital Foundry might just tip the scales in your favor. The experience of playing Pokemon Scarlet and Pokemon Violet has transformed dramatically on the Nintendo Switch 2, delivering enhanced visuals, smoother frame rates, and more polished animations. While it may not achieve perfection, it represents a marked improvement on the new hardware.
The largest visual difference in Scarlet and Violet on Switch 2 lies in image quality. The original game ran between 720p and 1080p in docked mode, and about 576p to 720p portably, without anti-aliasing treatment of any kind.
The updated version benefits from clean, temporally-treated visuals in comparison, with a vastly more stable rendition of its world. The game looks genuinely quite solid now in image quality terms, and even holds up well on a 4K television set. Shimmering is mostly a thing of the past, and aliasing artifacts are generally absent, especially in still shots.
The actual resolution counts are still reasonably low, with a 1080p internal resolution for docked play (without DRS) scaled up to 4K and a ~648p figure for handheld play (with DRS) scaled up to 1080p. Both modes seem to use a relatively cheap form of DLSS in performance terms.
Switch 2 is a huge improvement in docked mode, aiming for and usually hitting a 60fps frame-rate target. There are relatively frequent dropped frames while traversing the open world though, little 33ms blips that pop up when traveling through certain areas.
In handheld mode you can expect a similar update, which counts to around 60fps in my offscreen testing with high frame-rate footage. You can still feel small frame-time spikes as you drive around the environment, but it’s generally fine.