No, there are many ways to optimize besides turning down resolution.
Reducing shader complexity is one of them, as well as turning down particles. Those things suck away performance like crazy. Turning off post-processing effects should gain you a few frames too, and there's still the tried and true method of lowering geometry detail (although this can be a pita if you have to rework skinning)
I do sympathize with the devs porting this though. There's only so much you can do without changing the look of the game. They made a choice and went with preserving the games aesthetics.
Especially since it's Panic Button doing the port, not id Software themselves. Yeah, they might have gotten design documents and source files to work with, but fundamentally, these are people who likely had to figure
how the game works before they could start rebuilding it for a far lower spec machine. Given the potentially custom textures and settings involved, it's not like they just went for a simple solution either.
Edit:
Übermatik;249535419 said:
Unless you're being ridiculously sarcastic, you're an idiot.
Eh, it's standard rhetoric for how a game should theoretically run well on rather low end hardware - devs like
Lab Zero will use it themselves. True, you probably could build a PC priced similar to the Switch that would have much greater performance than the Switch, but the form factor is, well, a major factor here.