Or simply, how many ports are better looking than a game built natively on that hardware?
My point wasn't that a port will look as good as a ground-up game. My point was, if Shin'en are so accomplished and the Switch so powerful, why does their port not run near its intended target?
Are you comparing Wii U version to Switch or just looking at Switch version and asking why the game isn't 1080p 60fps 100% of the time, while pushing more effects, a new lighting engine and handling 4 player split screen.
Both. Your claim was that the game shows us the power Switch has on paper: 4-5x WiiU. If that were the case, then 4x the resolution alongside new effects (single player only) should be well doable. Especially given that the developer is widely viewed as the most technically adroit third-party working on Nintendo hardware.
But that's not all that we see. Yes, Switch does occasionally hit this level. But it's below that most of the time. As I said, this suggests bottlenecks to achieving the paper performance.
This is not a radical idea; real-world performance rarely matches spec sheet promises across the board.
...it's possible that the reason the target resolution exists is for this mode and when aggressively dynamic rendering, it can jump to that much lower resolution for a frame or two to avoid a drop in frame rate.
This is entirely my point. Why would the game have to reduce res by nearly an order of magnitude to maintain framerate?
That depends on how you define "temporal upscaling" the technique used on Wii U is most certainly *NOT* used in Fast RMX (which is what Shin'en refers to as "temporal upscaling") ...I feel pretty certain that Shin'en is just using adaptive resolution....
Fair enough, I trust your eyes. I'm just wary about developer claims, given multiple instances of other studios lying about the technical details of their games.