DOOM Eternal is undeniably one of the Switch’s more impressive ports. Transmitted by port specialists Panic Button, gameplay runs successfully at a solid 30 frames per second. However, compared to the PS4 and Xbox One editions, it had a significant visual hit.
As part of this performance tradeoff, cutscenes were also affected, with a maximum of 20 frames per second on Switch. In a conversation with Digital Foundry, Panic Button chief engineer Travis Archer discussed why these compromises were made, confirming:
As is typical of most games, the cutscenes are sometimes the most graphically intensive scenes in the game – lots of dynamic lights, lots of shadows, lots of animated complex geometry on the screen, and so in this case the importance for us didn’t lose that detail for the cutscenes. It’s like a big payout moment. It’s supposed to look really cool, and we decided it was better to play at a higher resolution in this case, as it didn’t affect gameplay – it doesn’t affect your ability to move smoothly through the game if you are in the game. in the middle of a movie. It was less critical.
Now, in terms of the end result, I think there are still improvements we can make to the cutscenes, and we plan to make some improvements to the cutscenes to improve its performance. But that was the decision, based mainly on how high the quality bar is for those scenes.
You can watch the full one hour video interview above, which offers some intriguing insights into how Panic Button got the “impossible” gate of DOOM Eternal. Digital Foundry previously published a breakdown of Eternal’s technology last month, confirming an improved performance Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
If you’d like to learn more, you can always check out our own review, where we’ve awarded the Switch port 8/10 stars.
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