Wednesday, June 25th 2025
Nintendo Switch 2 Slammed for Poor Display—120 Hz With 30 FPS Response Times
Despite the Nintendo Switch 2 offering rather modest specifications by today's standards, even for a handheld gaming device, it has already broken console sales records with over 3.5 million sales in its first four days on the market. The on-paper specs claim that the Nintendo Switch 2 is capable of 120 Hz, promising a sizeable upgrade over the 60 FPS display of the original Switch and Switch OLED. Recent testing by Monitors Unboxed and Digital Foundry, however, reveal that these claims may be less than honest, since the handheld console's real-world performance falls short by a fair margin.
The most noticeable issue with the Nintendo Switch 2's display is the response times. Despite having a 120 Hz display, Monitors Unboxed found in its testing that the display achieved an average response time of as high as 33 ms. While testing was conducted at 60 FPS, the response times even fall short of this low bar, with 16.67 ms being the slowest response time required for the pixels to refresh between frames such as to avoid blur or smearing. Even the original Nintendo Switch manages faster response times, with an average of 21.3 ms. This is further exemplified by the Blur Busters test conducted by Monitors Unboxed, where significant loss of detail can be seen in fast-moving objects. Brightness was better on the Switch 2 in Monitors Unboxed's testing, measuring in at around 400 nits, but contrast is less than spectacular, with contrast ratios measuring in at just 1068:1. Color performance was also good on the new Switch 2, with 97.6% coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut, however HDR performance suffered from the relatively low brightness and a lack of color management, which makes Switch 1 games seem more saturated than intended.
Monitors Unboxed goes on to theorize that the Switch 2's display is slow because Nintendo has seemingly not enabled overdrive and may be running additional low-voltage settings, likely to conserve energy and extend battery life. The end result of this is that, while the Nintendo Switch 2 may feel more responsive to play on, especially at 120 FPS, it comes at a noticeable sacrifice in image clarity at those higher resolutions. The likely cause of these slow response times also means Nintendo could theoretically address the issues with a firmware update.
Sources:
Monitors Unboxed, Digital Foundry
The most noticeable issue with the Nintendo Switch 2's display is the response times. Despite having a 120 Hz display, Monitors Unboxed found in its testing that the display achieved an average response time of as high as 33 ms. While testing was conducted at 60 FPS, the response times even fall short of this low bar, with 16.67 ms being the slowest response time required for the pixels to refresh between frames such as to avoid blur or smearing. Even the original Nintendo Switch manages faster response times, with an average of 21.3 ms. This is further exemplified by the Blur Busters test conducted by Monitors Unboxed, where significant loss of detail can be seen in fast-moving objects. Brightness was better on the Switch 2 in Monitors Unboxed's testing, measuring in at around 400 nits, but contrast is less than spectacular, with contrast ratios measuring in at just 1068:1. Color performance was also good on the new Switch 2, with 97.6% coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut, however HDR performance suffered from the relatively low brightness and a lack of color management, which makes Switch 1 games seem more saturated than intended.
Digital Foundry found similar results in its testing, with the publication similarly criticizing the Switch 2's display for its poor motion performance but also adding that the Switch 2's backlight is disappointingly a single panel instead of using dimming zones or something like a mini LED display, making a "true HDR" experience impossible on the Switch 2's built-in display.
66 Comments on Nintendo Switch 2 Slammed for Poor Display—120 Hz With 30 FPS Response Times
IMHO killer obstacle is that the NS2 uses the Ampere architecture. It'll be some time until the RTX 30 series GPUs are "rudimentary" enough to be simulated within a realistic hardware configuration. Doable? Sure... at full speed, with enough accuracy to boot and play commercial software? Another story entirely. Hell, in fact, cycle accurate Game Boy Advance emulators are just about beginning to appear and be wieldy enough to be used for actual playing.
Besides, the Nintendo emulation scene hasn't exactly recovered from the beatdown they took once the Big N went after Yuzu and Ryujinx, and fwiw, it may never recover from that.Nintendo will happily sell you a NS2 OLED in a couple of years. ;)
I wonder if things would be different if the Ada-based Tegra SoC (Atlan) hadn't been cancelled. The console would probably be twice as powerful.
Though guess you could implement something similar in GPU level, if you know the precise pixel response behaviour of the connected LCD panel.
And it itself doesn't have real effect to panel's power draw, which is made by backlight power draw and pixels needing continuous active control signal to show image.
Here's technical document about how it works:
www.ti.com/lit/an/snla185/snla185.pdfWhile corporate apologists always keep kissing those butts, eh?
It's OLEDs which don't use/need any response time compensation.
LCD panels pretty much always use some RTC as default if they're meant for gaming.
RTC is also what's behind one of the possible issues of LCDs especially with variable refresh rate: "inverse ghosting".
(too agressive RTC per refresh rate makes pixel overshoot the transition)
And even without RTC that's very slow panel:
For comparison modern tech IPS panels can actually do sub 10ms reponse times "natively".
Also such 33ms response time basically means it being not much more than 30Hz display in reality...
At 60Hz pixel has 16.7ms of time to change value if it doesn't want to be always lagging and chasing the actual value of that pixel image.
We wont be getting one of these though. Too bad because I was actually kind of looking forward to it lol..