We are still a good few weeks away from Monster Hunter Wilds’ 4th December Switch 2 release date, but earlier this week, Capcom released a demo for it on our beloved hybrids, and the tech experts over at Digital Foundry are here with an analysis of how it all plays.
Cutting straight to the point, DF’s Oliver Mackenzie seems very impressed with the port so far. Obviously, it’s only based on a small slice of the full experience at the moment, but things are looking good.
In comparison with the Xbox Series S, DF said that Switch 2 has some “big advantages”, including improved textures on the most part, additional screen-space reflections, and less aliasing effects on static elements in a scene.
It’s not wall-to-wall in Nintendo’s favour, but the DF analysis describes it as “competitive” with Microsoft’s system. Foliage animation and environmental shadowing seem to have taken a bit of a hit in the Switch 2 demo, and the decreased frame rate of background NPCs comes across as a little more distracting on the handheld.
Resolution-wise, the demo is coming in at 648p — higher than most other RE Engine games on the console — which is a little lower than the Series S, but it makes good use of DLSS.
Naturally, it’s not quite at the level of the PS5, though DF points out that “all three platforms have strengths and weaknesses from an image quality perspective” — let’s not forget, the game didn’t launch in the best state last year.
Onto performance, and the Wilds demo seems to run at a consistent 30fps with no frame-pacing problems. In the game’s Frame-Rate mode, the demo drops resolution a little and removes screen-space reflections, but hits 40-55fps. In handheld, the resolution drops further still (around 432p, upsampled to a lower target) and keeps running at a consistent 30fps with locked frame rate enabled, while the uncapped mode gets a little more choppy, thanks to VRR not working properly.
What do you make of the Monster Hunter Wilds demo so far? Let us know in the comments.
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