Ark: Survival Evolved on Switch runs at the “lowest possible” quality, says Digital Foundry

Ark: Survival Evolved, from Studio Wildcard, was recently ported to the Nintendo Switch and was not considered a good port. The Digital Foundry analyst team pointed out that the developer cut the game’s graphical quality to the absolute minimum.

At various points the game hits the lowest resolution ever seen in a game of this generation (and very possibly even the previous generation), reaching an “incredible” 170p (304×170). In addition, according to DF, the forest areas are completely devoid of detail, the jungle floor looks unfinished, the textures are bad to the point of looking like they belong to a Nintendo 64 game, and loading times are very long. DF said:

“This game is so blurry and so low-resolution that it is hard even to understand which techniques are in use here. Standard pixel-counting techniques indicate resolutions around 360p and 432p in docked mode, but if you pause the game during motion, the entire screen ‘breaks up’ and huge pixel edges become evident. In these cases, the lowest we counted was 304×170. With this problematic presentation it is hard to confirm these values, but suffice it to say this is easily the blurriest image we have seen on a console of this generation. It may be that the game is using Unreal’s temporal upsampling feature to smooth the pixel edges, but the base resolution is very low and you end up with a very blurry result.

In handheld mode, the problem is exacerbated, with even lower pixel counts. Again, getting precise numbers here is a challenge, but what matters is that the game is even blurrier, with more cuts to image quality. Everything is reduced to a point where it becomes almost unrecognizable. It is true that playing on the smaller screen helps hide some of these flaws a bit, but even so, it is still very noticeable.”

Source: Eurogamer