Earlier this week,Digital Foundry, one of the best tech analysis sources online, released a review and deep dive into the hardware of theNintendoSwitch 2and brought up serious issues with the screen quality, motion blur, and HDR capabilities of the LCD screen.
Not to be outdone, YouTubers are performing their own tests to figure out just what’s going on with the motion blur and ghosting issues with Switch 2’s screen.
The Numbers Are In And It’s Very Bad
Barely Faster Than The PSP Screen
Monitors Unboxed ran the screenthrough numerous tests and, while normally known for testing gaming monitors, was able to come up with some impressive (impressively low) results for the average response time. Where a typical LCD monitor averages a response time of 6.3 ms (which your local COD pro will tell you is too slow), the Switch 2’s screen came up at 33.3 ms, making it the slowest LCD screen tested by this channel.
Scrolling through the menu, Digital Foundry filmed the Switch 2 menu in slow motion to show that “as it moves, the image essentially leaves behind… four individual ghost images of everything on the screen,” said John Linneman at Digital Foundry. “Your eyes perceive this as blur.” This trailing and ghosting effect was most noticeable when playing 2D or side-scrolling games, or any games with a lot of lateral motion and is noticeably worse than the original Switch model.
As with anything on the internet, there’s much disagreement about the quality of the screen, with many players responding on Twitter that their model doesn’t have these ghosting issues. Linneman responded to these users on Twitter, saying the numbers are worse than expected, making the Switch 2 screen barely faster than the original Sony PSP handheld.
“So why’s the Switch 2 LCD so slow?” said Monitors Unboxed. “Well, one thing is clear, Nintendo is not using any form of Overdrive on this panel.” Most modern LCD gaming monitors use LCD overdrive, an often optional setting to achieve those fast response times that PC gamers have all but required in their experiences, but this process draws noticeably more battery power, and it’s speculated that battery life is the reason it’s missing here.
It may be possible that a hardware update could implement LCD overdrive as an option and reduce many of the issues with the slow response time. This won’t fixevery issue with the screen, like the inability to be bright enough for a true HDR experience, but motion blur (or the perception of) is a much hated feature in all games, and I’m sure some players would rather live with lower battery life.
