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UE4 graphics setting presets for the Switch found on GitHub

hemo memo

Gold Member
Basically graphics settings themselves will scale down to match the portable mode, not just resolution.

That seems very hard to do though, its almost like making two SKU's with completely different configurations and then having to switch between them instead of just making a resolution switch like PS4 and Pro.

That could be an obstacle getting down and dirty with the hardware, but having to account for handheld mode will have done that by default i suppose.

Considering the agressive nature of their clock speeds, i guess they do this specifically because they can't control the state of the game without massive cutbacks like this

But is it not like the PS4 / Vita cross games? and we see alot of those.
 

antonz

Member
But is it not like the PS4 / Vita cross games? and we see alot of those.

Nintendo I would say is absolutely setting itself up to be the easy ride along version when possible. The fact many of Japans PS4 games do end up downscaled to Vita of all thing shows where Switch can step in and be even less effort to accomplish.

I've long stated the fact Japan has begun to embrace UE so heavily and Nintendo is finally cooperating with Epic enough o get full unhindered Unreal support would be a big boost to its game library.
 

DavidDesu

Member
Really wonder if they'll let you play in portable mode but hooked up to a USBC cable to unleash the full settings downsampled to the 720p screen. That would look amazing like that. If I played in bed I might as well have it hooked up to the power that's right beside me. Happy to take the hit to graphics when truly mobile though.
 

Inuhanyou

Believes Dragon Quest is a franchise managed by Sony
But is it not like the PS4 / Vita cross games? and we see alot of those.

A vast majority of those games are developed on the vita as a baseline first, and then scaled up to PS4, not the other way around, there is no way a lot of these games could work if actually developed on PS4 first.

These days, development is heavily leaned in favor of PS4, so that the vita version can at times suffer and produce bad ports.

The Switch situation is that kind of general scenario in a single unit, despite the two modes being much closer than vita is to PS4.
 
Really wonder if they'll let you play in portable mode but hooked up to a USBC cable to unleash the full settings downsampled to the 720p screen. That would look amazing like that. If I played in bed I might as well have it hooked up to the power that's right beside me. Happy to take the hit to graphics when truly mobile though.

If there really is a fan in the final unit and it runs in docked mode then I doubt this will happen. If it runs in portable mode too, then maybe- but I think they would want to avoid using this as a portable device (especially a portable device with motion controls) while the fan is running.
 
Why would they release handheld mode shots?

I would imagine that publishers/ developers would have to release screenshots and videos in both game modes to help advertise the game properly. If these UE4 settings indicate anything, then games will have more than just different screen resolutions.There's also going to be let's play video captures and random user screenshots as well.
 

LCGeek

formerly sane

shira

Member
They're significantly scaling back a variety of graphics settings when in handheld mode by default instead of just chopping the resolution to 720p.

ayyy

Basically, it means Nintendo is going out of business.

ayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
kunk-rum.gif
 

Cerium

Member
I would imagine that publishers/ developers would have to release screenshots and videos in both game modes to help advertise the game properly.
Why? Devs release bullshots and pass CG as gameplay all the time. They're not going to go out of their way to show their game at its worst.
 
That's due to Nvidia giving a shit about their drivers vs amd.

Vulkan still performs better and tops out higher in comparison. You can check youtube videos and see it performs better in heavy situation, which is something anyone would welcome on a console. With nvidia doing the OS plus their own API nintendo the port could do quite a bit.

I posted this video a couple days ago in a Linux thread on this forum. It shows DOOM running on Wine under Linux with Vulkan enabled. Since id removed Denovo from the game, DOOM became playable on Wine.

The Vulkan passthrough from Wine to the Linux Nvidia driver shows insane performance on Linux. I have read reports from other people running DOOM in Wine that performance is nearly 1:1 to Windows using Vulkan in a native environment.

Right now Nvidia's Vulkan performance isn't that much better than their OpenGL performance, but that Wine video shows that the portability of Vulkan is going to be useful across multiple platforms. If a developer focuses on making a high end mobile game using an engine like UE4 and the Vulkan API, it should make porting the game to the Switch rather seemless. I also imagine that this would be the case for PS4.x/ OBO.x to Switch ports to Switch as well, though the switch games would still have to go through some downgrades there. Or even Switch to PC ports.

I think Vulkan is a good way to help third parties streamline their development pipelines between multiple platforms.


Why? Devs release bullshots and pass CG as gameplay all the time. They're not going to go out of their way to show their game at its worst.

Sure dev's love to bullshot. But game review websites or video reviewers/ bloggers/ let's players might use footage from different game modes.
 

10k

Banned
That's due to Nvidia giving a shit about their drivers vs amd.

Vulkan still performs better and tops out higher in comparison. You can check youtube videos and see it performs better in heavy situation, which is something anyone would welcome on a console. With nvidia doing the OS plus their own API nintendo the port could do quite a bit.
I dunno. I remember both versions being buttery smooth for me. But I used vulkan after the first twenty minutes or so. Had no problems.

Of course I was running it on good hardware so I doubt I would see any gains in vulkan. (980Ti and 3770k 4.2Ghz)
 
RSX was particularly bad there (1tri/2clks on paper) hence all the work done via SPEs for culling, but WiiU also had a slightly faster core clock than PS360.

Switch likely only has one raster engine (it's a relatively big area cost), and WiiU's probably isn't that great coming from an earlier generation than GCN, which itself isn't particularly great (pre-GCN4/Polaris), so it wouldn't surprise me if the mobile mode was fine there.
Thanks. I forgot about that issue with the PS3. So, in terms of rendering geometry, are we likely looking at something like:

PS3* << 360 < Wii U < Switch-HH** << Switch-Console** < XB1** < PS4**

* The PS3 was able to compete against the 360 in polygons with the aid of its SPEs.
** Can efficiently use tessellation

I'm glad that UE4 makes it relatively simple to scale down. That means that devs are encouraged to design games closer to the current-gen range and scale down to HH-mode instead of designing a game around Wii U+ specs and just increasing the resolution for console-mode.
 
I'm glad that UE4 makes it relatively simple to scale down. That means that devs are encouraged to design games closer to the current-gen range and scale down to HH-mode instead of designing a game around Wii U+ specs and just increasing the resolution for console-mode.

Anyone could download UE4 and use those system presets and start making a Switch game now if they wanted to.
 

Cerium

Member
Does anyone know how long these "Wolf" presets have been available in UE4? Might give us an indication of how long Switch devs have been working with the engine.
 

LCGeek

formerly sane
I dunno. I remember both versions being buttery smooth for me. But I used vulkan after the first twenty minutes or so. Had no problems.

Of course I was running it on good hardware so I doubt I would see any gains in vulkan. (980Ti and 3770k 4.2Ghz)

980ti sports only mild improvements as my 970 does. On pascal stuff the gain is a bit more. The big point I wanted to mentioned vs opengl is it doesn't dip in certain spots and with async in various places it pushes higher. That's huge to cut down minimal average dips while driving up the peak. For nintendo console which has seen none of the gains of windows or low level apis have this is good plus for devs. Another huge benefit of vulkan vs opengl is how much stuff you can use while keeping rendering times low vs anything not DX12 or mantle that is a huge benefit.

If you check my post history there is 3 way comparison video I use to show it, cause the OSD really tracks the game in a heavy scene showing difference vs opengl vulkan in it. Doom also happens to be insanely smooth regardless of api but that's due to good engine optimization.

MrCunningham great points. Doom in linux is great cause there are no driver issues to get in the way. With the point you mention I'm wondering how it would perform on my custom linux build systems, they tweaks for more cpu/interrupt/io performance than usual plus anti buffer bloat tech and network tweaks. I think it would show serious gains vs windows if that wine stuff is happening.
 

DekuLink

Member
Would really suck if it's running at a subnative resolution on the handheld.

I agree, my first impression of PS Vita actually was disappointment since Uncharted ran at a sub-native resolution. Was looking forward to seeing the high-res portable oled screen and instead got a blurry scaled picture. I have no problem with 720p on a 1080p TV on a reasonable distance, but sub native on a handheld screen up close, if the resolutions aren't high enough, just doesn't look good.
 

M3d10n

Member
Ah yeah, that makes sense now. I bet the Switch is going to be using the full UE4 renderer through Vulkan. Though it probably also supports OpenGL ES 3.1 too.

Epic is more likely to be using the custom low level API NVidia made for the Switch instead of plain OpenGL or Vulkan. They're the ones selling engine licenses (or collecting royalties on it), so they better make sure their engine uses the hardware to its fullest.
 
Really wonder if they'll let you play in portable mode but hooked up to a USBC cable to unleash the full settings downsampled to the 720p screen. That would look amazing like that. If I played in bed I might as well have it hooked up to the power that's right beside me. Happy to take the hit to graphics when truly mobile though.

As cool as that sounds, probably not. The dock might have a special chip in it that will let the Switch know that it's indeed a dock. In portable mode, Nintendo will probably want the switch to run as cool in your hands as possible.
 

CrustyBritches

Gold Member
That's due to Nvidia giving a shit about their drivers vs amd.

Vulkan still performs better and tops out higher in comparison. You can check youtube videos and see it performs better in heavy situation, which is something anyone would welcome on a console. With nvidia doing the OS plus their own API nintendo the port could do quite a bit.

Ok, I'll check out some vids. Somebody had told me it was due to Nvidia having inferior support for shader intrinsics and lacking hardware async support. I've seen that the Pascal chips seem to fare better, whilst GTX 950/970 either simply match OpenGL 4.5 or even take a performance loss.
 

atbigelow

Member
Really wonder if they'll let you play in portable mode but hooked up to a USBC cable to unleash the full settings downsampled to the 720p screen. That would look amazing like that. If I played in bed I might as well have it hooked up to the power that's right beside me. Happy to take the hit to graphics when truly mobile though.

Not sure why they would. Complicates the system setup and wouldn't have a lot of benefit. Also muddies the system message.
 

Durante

Member
Epic is more likely to be using the custom low level API NVidia made for the Switch instead of plain OpenGL or Vulkan. They're the ones selling engine licenses (or collecting royalties on it), so they better make sure their engine uses the hardware to its fullest.
I wonder if there really is much additional performance to gain from using a custom API over Vulkan (with maybe a few extensions). I can't imagine there's much in the general case.

If that hunch is true, I wonder if it is worth it for Nintendo to even offer very low level (sub-Vulkan) access. By doing so, they marry themselves to a very specific GPU architecture, while staying at (mostly) the Vulkan level would allow them to keep their hardware options open for fully BC successor systems.
 

Oregano

Member
I wonder if there really is much additional performance to gain from using a custom API over Vulkan (with maybe a few extensions). I can't imagine there's much in the general case.

If that hunch is true, I wonder if it is worth it for Nintendo to even offer very low level (sub-Vulkan) access. By doing so, they marry themselves to a very specific GPU architecture, while staying at (mostly) the Vulkan level would allow them to keep their hardware options open for fully BC successor systems.
Someone else posted this but Id software's Tiago Sousa seems to think Vulkan is the way to go. https://mobile.twitter.com/idSoftwareTiago/status/810993040538136580
 

FoxSpirit

Junior Member
That's due to Nvidia giving a shit about their drivers vs amd.

Vulkan still performs better and tops out higher in comparison. You can check youtube videos and see it performs better in heavy situation, which is something anyone would welcome on a console. With nvidia doing the OS plus their own API nintendo the port could do quite a bit.

Caveat: in Vulkan it does so by drawing on CPU power (not on D3D/OGL though):
https://www.hardwareunboxed.com/gtx-1060-vs-rx-480-in-6-year-old-amd-and-intel-computers/

On an i5-750 the RX-480 actually has worse Vulkan performance than a 1060. Since consoles are already starved for CPU power going AMD will not have a performance increase. On top, current architectures have NVidia come out on top in the performance/Watt game which is crucial.

Of course, we'll have to see how the chip used in the Switch will actually perform since sadly it seems to be older stuff :-\
 

Durante

Member
Of course, we'll have to see how the chip used in the Switch will actually perform since sadly it seems to be older stuff :-\
Architecturally, the difference of Maxwell (v2) compared to Pascal is rather small. (The primary improvements seem to be mostly useful for use cases like VR)
 

Thraktor

Member
It allows the game to switch between modes without having to change the output resolution or recreate the display surface, so I suppose the change between modes would be as fast as possible. The Switch will probably allow devs to actually do that, but seems Epic has, so far, decided to keep things simple. It helps with UI design as well, since the UI canvas will always 1080p and you don't have to bother with setting up UI scale curves.

Also, I doubt the Switch enforces games to undergo a resolution change, it's an alien concept on consoles (I think the PS3 was the only one where devs *had* to react to resolution changes or risk nothing showing up on the screen). The OS most likely takes the display surface created by the game, whatever its resolution is, and stretches it to fill the actual output framebuffer (all modern consoles do this - they have to in order to draw OS widgets on top of the games).

Thanks for the clarification. One other benefit that just occurred to me is that, if Nintendo releases a Switch revision with a higher-res screen (say for VR), then you should get a sharper UI automatically without having to update the game.

I think what happened there was that it uses only the cubemaps in low settings (which support pre-generated blurring), then goes into "fast SSR" (which doesn't supports blurring), then goes to "high quality SSR" (which does support blurring).

Ah, that makes a lot of sense. I assume that a developer specifically looking for more of a diffuse reflection would just jump straight from cube maps to high quality SSR.

I wonder if there really is much additional performance to gain from using a custom API over Vulkan (with maybe a few extensions). I can't imagine there's much in the general case.

If that hunch is true, I wonder if it is worth it for Nintendo to even offer very low level (sub-Vulkan) access. By doing so, they marry themselves to a very specific GPU architecture, while staying at (mostly) the Vulkan level would allow them to keep their hardware options open for fully BC successor systems.

Given that Nintendo's joined Khronos's Vulkan working group, I'm suspecting that they may well be going this route. If you've got a custom API and you're just supporting Vulkan for compatibility's sake then it wouldn't make much sense to be on the working group.

It also makes sense from the point of view of a company coming off the Wii U (which was heavily constrained, hardware-wise, by BC) to go out of their way to prevent those kind of headaches in future.
 

MacTag

Banned
Those Tekken 6 ports are bespoke versions specifically made for that hardware. If they make a Tekken game on the Switch they aren't just gonna take the arcade game and flip a few settings.
It could end up being more like Tekken 3 AC to PS1, which was a 50% reduction in hardware capability but still using the same exact engine. Do we know how high specced the T7 board is? At the least using a common engine should make the port easier than PSP and 3DS were, which were both outsourced anyway iirc.

Well, I mean, I don't know if it's a technical marvel or anything, but UMvC3 on Vita is quite an impressive port.

You can even cross play with PS3 people iirc. Considering the Vita hardware and how superior the Switch will be to it, I wouldn't discard anything.
Presumably MVCI would need to be even less compromised too. It's a larger proportional leap in raw flops going from PS3 to Vita than it is Xbox One to Switch, and far less of a leap CPU wise too.

I wonder if any first party games will utilise Unreal Engine 4, would be strange for Nintendo but was it Next Level games that was employing for people with experience with the engine?
It's possible Nintendo is looking to exploiting 3rd party engines and tools more generally. After all Super Mario Run uses Unity.

The Switch situation is that kind of general scenario in a single unit, despite the two modes being much closer than vita is to PS4.
Much closer is putting it mildly. It's more like PS4 to PS4 Pro or GC to Wii, Vita to PS4 is almost like going from 3DS to Switch.
 

jett

D-Member
It could end up being more like Tekken 3 AC to PS1, which was a 50% reduction in hardware capability but still using the same exact engine. Do we know how high specced the T7 board is? At the least using a common engine should make the port easier than PSP and 3DS were, which were both outsourced anyway iirc.

Well that's a bit different since the Tekken 3 arcade hardware is based on the PS1, that made things easier, but they still had to redo every single background in the game, virtually turning them into 2D backdrops.

We don't know what Tekken 7 is using at all. We'll see how it fares on the PS4 and Xbone, since to my eyes it looks noticeably better than SFV, another UE4 fighter.
 

tuxfool

Banned
We don't know what Tekken 7 is using at all. We'll see how it fares on the PS4 and Xbone, since to my eyes it looks noticeably better than SFV, another UE4 fighter.

Tekken 7 is UE4 and it looks better than SFV merely due to the poor bg art in the latter. From what we've seen of PC demos, it runs really well.
 

OryoN

Member
Off-topic...

Is the Samaritan demo available to the public? I found that demo a lot more visually impressive than the Elemental demo(I guess due to art and better use of - though not as robust - lighting). Particles weren't the main focus, but weren't bad either. I'm curious to know how well that would run with today's GPUs and UE4. I remember it was running on two Titans when it was first unveiled.
 

GDGF

Soothsayer
I doubt this is 1:1 what it would look like on Switch hardware, but it's probably fairly close. Looks pretty fantastic to me for a small battery powered handheld.

That'll look really nice on a 6.2 inch screen.

If that is representative of what Unreal Engine 4 would look like on the Switch I would be freaking ecstatic.
 

Thraktor

Member
Off-topic...

Is the Samaritan demo available to the public? I found that demo a lot more visually impressive than the Elemental demo(I guess due to art and better use of - though not as robust - lighting). Particles weren't the main focus, but weren't bad either. I'm curious to know how well that would run with today's GPUs and UE4. I remember it was running on two Titans when it was first unveiled.

If I'm not mistaken I think that may have been back when they were using SVOGI, so it may not look as good with the current lighting model.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FX8Xut1NHR8 Here's a mockup I did showing UT4 running at the recommended settings for Switch (all medium, 720p [devs aren't stupid, if performance is abysmal, resolution is the first thing to go out the window], 30FPS cap). I'm gonna try downclocking my potato laptop to achieve ~400GFLOPS on the GPU (Nvidia GPU; should be fairly comparable) and see what performance is like at those settings (and see how necessary a 30FPS cap would be).
 
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