The great Persona 5 Royal has been the subject of comparisons by Digital Foundry, including the Nintendo Switch version.
It goes without saying that Persona 5 Royal performs best on Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5, and PC, but the majority of you are likely interested in how it performs on Nintendo’s current console. Since the game is essentially a PlayStation 3 port, the team has stated that the resolution in docked mode is 1140x810p and in handheld mode is 940x540p. This is not ideal. According to Digital Foundry, when playing handheld mode, players can “expect a blurry and imprecise resolve with a clumsy handling of distant detail.”Â
Digital Foundry: Persona 5 Royal highlights
“However, I had conflicting emotions about the outcome. There are a few significant problems with this. First and foremost, texture resolution has decreased significantly on all fronts. The texture assets used on Switch are taken from the Royal version, however they are noticeably inferior to those shown on PS4. At worst, the findings could be a little jumbled, and sometimes, material attributes might be absent. This has a knock-on effect on the baked shadow in the game as well, which makes it clear that the transfer falls short of the PS4 version. Additionally, there has been a reduction in rendering resolution. The game renders at 1440810 in docked mode, which is significantly higher than 720p. Even less portable play is available at 960540.
In order to resolve small details, such as the thin lines that encircle character models, Persona 5 heavily relies on raw pixel count. Without any picture processing, not even a basic post-AA, it offers a highly high-contrast aesthetic, making aliasing and other visual flaws obvious. Even at 1080p, image quality is already a little lacking, but at 810p, the picture is rather sloppy. Although it’s not horrible, I was hoping for a better outcome since Persona 5 Royal is basically still a PS3 game at heart and many seventh-gen games run at 1080p in TV play on Switch.
However, the portable mode is what really falls short. Persona 5 Royal is rendering roughly 56% of the entire 720p panel resolution at 540p, and this is noticeable. With a bad handling of distant detail, anticipate a fuzzy and inaccurate resolution. I was looking for 720p video that was pixel-precise, but this is not it. Contrary to several other recent low-res Switch releases, Atlus at least chose a bilinear scale here, so aliasing artifacts aren’t overly accentuated. Additionally, the UI seems to be rendered in all modes at the console output resolution, making it appear considerably cleaner than the 3D content. The one point plus? At least the performance is constant, with all 3D aspects playing out at a smooth 30 frames per second.
