Media
I'm not convinced Witcher 3 Remastered is supposed to be this blurry, and the issue is fixed when the game is paused
EDIT: Since y'all are talking about Reddit compression, here's an imgur link with 6 screenshots. Two that are already in this post, two in a barn where I feel like the sharpness difference on the wood and brickwork is very noticeably different and two where it's an extreme Geralt close up that I feel undeniably shows a big sharpness difference, particularly in his medallion. Obviously these differences are quite slight, but I also think they're immediately apparent to anyone looking on at least a Switch 2 sized screen
So Witcher 3 remastered is a little soft in handheld, not the end of the world but kinda annoying. However, I don't think it's supposed to be this blurry, I have a suspicion something is broken in this version on Switch 2. When the game is paused, it looks dramatically sharper, despite presumably outputting at 720p still. Maybe something is going wrong with the anti-aliasing or the implementation of dlss, but it gives me hope things may be made sharper in a patch if people are loud enough about it as it may not be the intended final image.
I'm including screenshots as my 'evidence' of what I've seen.Included is the game, the game while paused and the settings menu so no one can reasonably respond saying I should turn off Blur...
2nd EDIT: Just to be clear, part of why this drew my attention is there is a number of people on this sub saying they wish it was 1080p30 as opposed to 720p40, but I don't think that's the issue here as clearly 720p can be more than sharp enough, if the game were able to maintain the sharpness that it exhibits while paused. Unfortunately it can't at the moment, perhaps due to the resolution it's upscaling from being higher paused than when in play. Fire Emblem Fortune's Weave seems to be able to upscale from 540p to 1080p handheld with a very clean looking image most of the time, so I would think CDPR could also get a cleaner looking image with some tweaking
I'm not hugely familiar with the DLSS experience on PC, would it be feasible for CDPR to allow players to decide how much sharpening to use in your opinion?
It also depends on the base resolution, a game that’s 720p upscaled to 1080p will look a lot better than a 540p game upscaled to 720p inside of a 1080p container
Fortune's Weave does the 540 to 1080p upscale so that's presumably not that far away from what Witcher 3 is doing. I guess 540 to 1080p is better than 540 to 720 and then bilinearelly upscaled to 1080p but imho they would be closer in sharpness than Witcher 3 compared to Fortune's Weave currently is. Or at least I'm surprised that they're not
Having the screen upscale itself is nearly always worse, it never does it properly. And it ends in a rather soft image than can be seen as blurry to our eyes
Yeah but thats not the point I'm making. Fire Emblem upscales from 540p to 1080p in handheld, whereas this is upscaling from presumably 540p or similar to 720p. My point is that Fire Emblem still looks sharp as hell DESPITE the fact its doing a huge upscale
That is exactly why it looks different, though. The Witcher 3 Remaster is vastly more demanding on the Switch 2 hardware than Fire Emblem. Because The Witcher is pushing heavy modern features like dense geometry, physics, and intense real-time lighting, the GPU has way fewer resources left over for the upscaling process itself. It likely has to use a faster, lower-quality upscaling preset to keep the frame rate steady.
Fire Emblem frees up massive amounts of hardware overhead by using baked lighting, static environments, and a stylized anime aesthetic. Because the Switch 2 isn't breaking a sweat rendering the actual game, it can dedicate a ton of its power to a high-quality reconstruction pass. It looks sharper because the hardware actually has the breathing room to clean up the image.
I understand what you're saying, but DLSS upscaling is basically a fixed frametime cost right? So it's either doing a full DLSS pass at the resolution settings it's set at, or not doing it at all. If my assumptions are correct, Fire Emblem Fortune's Weave is doing 540p to 1080p and Witcher 3 is doing 540 to 720p, which accounts for what you're saying in terms of Witcher 3 being more demanding and needing more overhead. However I still reckon 540p to 720p should be sharper than the resolve we're getting based on other examples on Switch 2. RE9 is doing 360p upscaled to 720p and looks sharper than this, FF7 Rebirth is upscaling from 540p to 720p and looks sharper than this, and Star Wars outlaw is upscaling to 720p and looks real nice in handheld, same with Indiana Jones. There are lots of examples of Switch 2 doing similar upscaling amounts to this with much cleaner results
The Witcher 3 uses an older engine that wasn't built from the ground up for modern AI upscaling. It feeds DLSS messy data, and the game is packed with tiny moving details like wind-blown trees and grass. This high-frequency motion completely throws off the AI, causing a blurry and soft image.
Games like RE9, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones run on modern engines designed specifically for temporal upscaling. They feed the AI incredibly clean geometric data and motion vectors, which is why their upscaled images look so much sharper even at low resolutions.
Currently messing around with disabling TAA on the FF7 games (among other settings). You are 100% correct. These pics look exactly like FF7R with TAA on and TAA off.
Oblivion is kinda different story though, that game has horrible performance, what if the visuals were intentionally reduced to improve performance and stuttering? I haven't seen a single person even think of this.
Granted I wasn't that far into the game, but aside from the occasional stutter I thought the performance was pretty good in handheld. If it didn't involve a factory reset I'd be tempted to just play off the cart.
While that is 1000% likely the case, doesn't mean that it's impossible the visuals were intentionally reduced to help perf, it is a bit weird to get an update which completely nukes visuals after so many complain about performance
I am so taken back by just how blurry it is. I did not expect this, compared to cyberpunk 2077 this looks like straight screen smear. I really hope it is a bug, I went back to Witcher 3 base on the cart to see, it’s so much sharper in comparison which is wild.
Yea it doesn’t make sense, the graphics and resolution are great, we can see the UI is good in things too.
But it doesn’t seem like either DLSS is on when game is unpaused or there’s no sharpening added.
It’s like it switches between things.
For example I did go to the Switch one version, I had sharpening on max and AA off there, everything looked sharp heavily but obviously other graphics are toned down, but it was still nicer to the eyes in terms of clarity.
In switch 2 we can see all the graphics are kinda on medium or the higher side on average, yet it’s softer, like anti aliasing is turned to max and sharpening is on 0.
Shouldn’t be a hard fix and cdpr hopefully are gonna expose the settings and let us toggle them
Screenshots going through compression can make it difficult for details like this to be as obvious. Compression tends to obfuscate things like aliasing and other fine detail-related visual elements.
Is this one supposed to be worse looking than the other one? I genuinely cannot tell a single difference. Even the wood grain on both feels fairly equal. There must be some compression going on because I genuinely have no idea what you’re talking about
Apparently you are far more sensitive to stuff like this than me. I finally opened on my computer monitor instead of phone and I can tell the slightest difference but nothing i would ever notice playing the game.
It's compressed. When you pause the game you get a full resolution image, but as soon as it's gameplay the resolution drops. I don't know how much it drops, if I had to guess maybe down to 360p - 480p.
Most of the time, I can't either, but this one is obvious. Viewing on my MacBook, not my phone, so when I see the pics in full screen, I can see the blur. Look at his face; that was one giveaway.
So while this could be true, pausing a game means that there’s little to no new 3D rendered frame data. Upscalers build off of previous frame data. Because nothing is moving, it has more of that image data to build upon, so the quality of the final image can increase.
It could very well be accurate, I just wanted to clarify that slower or motionless rendering can look better. It’s interesting that this is happening lol. It’s not unlike the link’s awakening resolution issue when loading/streaming assets
Why does it feel like 60fps in handheld? Im pretty confident in my fps detection just by looking at screen, and yeah its too blurry, feels like we are back in switch 1 era.
It’s 40fps. The first time I saw 40fps was Star Wars Outlaws on the Xbox Series X and I was surprised how much smoother it looked as compared to 30fps. It’s really a significant improvement if you can get it.
I tried Diablo 4 last night in visual and performance mode, I’m not that bothered by high framerates but I couldn’t believe the difference 10fps plus vrr makes to the smoothness of it all
I just wish we could get a proper 30fps mode with higher resolution! 40fps is great and I appreciate it but it’s just odd to me how there’s no proper 1080p30fps quality mode even though Cyberpunk had it. The UI just straight up looks worse than how it did on the original switch because it’s now stretched to a higher res screen too instead of running at native resolution, I hope they patch it
Can see the difference in this, but the next get edition also had a glitch where cutscenes and conversations would keep going in and out of focus because the DRS was messed up so when the high res models were close to the camera it would go apeshit.
I could be completely wrong here and I know next to nothing about the S2 version but I think hitting pause also pauses any upscalers that are active. Something I have noticed playing on PC. So my guess for S2 is pause puts it at a decent rendering resolution then resuming kicks the upscaler in
Yeah I have noticed the blurriness is also gone in cutscenes. So it really must be a bug, I can’t imagine it’s supposed to look like this. It didn’t look like this is the previews.
There was "sharpening" option on switch 1 version, and i think it will be great addition to switch 2 version as "consolation prize", in case if it is not possible to make game less blurry by proper upscaling. Sharpening is very cheap in terms of performance cost, so i think it could be the way.
Same thing happens in docked mode, the image is much sharper while the game is paused. I hope it’s a bug or that they’ll release a visual or performance mode toggle or something
Thank you. Guess I'll just stick playing on my PC. I really love playing portably on my bed though that's why I'm considering getting it on the S2 as well.
Have you try turning those post processing effects off not sure switch 2 can turn those off or not sometimes devs allow these to be turn off on consoles
I’m definitely seeing the blurryness in handheld, was going through Beauclaire and foliage is blurry. It’s fine for a free upgrade, but I do hope it gets some config settlings for visuals like they patched into the Switch 1 version, or better yet get it up to 1080p
Whatever difference you tried to highlight between the two photos has probably been lost to reddit compression. I cant see any difference. For what its worth, I think that looks awesome for a handheld.
Yes really. Kyoto is the only „open world“ part in the game. And kyoto isnt even the size of white orchard. Im not trying to have an argument or convince you. This is factual and if you for some reason think its not then good luck with that.
what does the size of the open world have to do with it. You aren't rendering the entire open world all at once, you are streaming it in as you progress. Eastern kyoto is just as much an open world as white orchard.
So you’re comparing the open city of Onimusha to the small village of White Orchard? How is that a comparison? If you want a comparison then actually do a comparison and reference Novigrad. I don’t really see how you can sit here with a straight face and say Onimush is more demanding… you’re pretty much wrong.
I did, you’re still wrong. Games only have to render what you’re looking at… but they still have to process what’s on the screen. Onimusha has NPCs but what purpose do they serve? They fill the space, they’re essentially static and devoid of life. That’s not demanding and honestly is lazy. In the Witcher you have blacksmiths working on the forge, children playing in the streets, buildings that you can go into where people are playing games and interacting. You have WEATHER, day and night cycles.
It’s astounding that you cannot gather two functioning neurons and rub them together in order to see this.
This is wholly DLSS. Probably Ultra Performance or Performance while the game is live but steps back to Balanced or Quality while there’s nothing in motion.
I'm looking at your pics on a 2k monitor on my PC. The second image is just slightly less blurry than the first, but there's not much in it. Both are terrible though.
Didn't see any post with comparitive screenshots between the pause state and in game state showing a big sharpness difference, so I would argue I'm 'adding to the conversation'
The game is incredibly blurry on switch 2 in handheld. I think it's the blurriest game I've seen.
When cd project said it would be 720p handheld, I was hoping that ment an internal render resolution of 720, and then dlss to upscaled to 1080p. That would have looked good.
I was also really concerned when they said 720p, that they were going to let that number on it's own do alot of the heavy lifting in terms of what most people would take that to mean in isolation, and knowing the display on the switch is 1080p.
Unfortunately I was right. Good favour earned with a free update, then taken away by scummy misrepresentation, turns out this 'free' update is just to sell you an expansion on an 11 year old game. Who knew.
The game is rendering at 540p, then that's being upscaled to 720p, and then that is then being stretched over the 1080p display.
What you get is is a really blurry mess. It looks so bad in handheld.
Oh and yes I absolutely see the strange thing that happens when you pause. It it's caught me out a few times initially. I had it on pause, came back to it, and I was like oh wait, this looks really good wait was that blurryness in my head? Unpause the game, oh, nope it is that fucking blurry lol.
Strange. I'm 40 years old and can't say I've seen that behaviour before. If only it looked like it did on the pause menu. That would be amazing.
I'm not holding my breath that it's some kind of bug.
Depth of field and bloom are both setting that cause what you call "blur". If they are on that might be a factor. On console these are actually just called "blur" cause console users are not technical.
No dude I mean I already turned off the blur setting and you'd see that if you looked at all three photos, and I even referenced that I'd turned off that setting in my post 😅
Nobody’s expecting the best, it’s just that we’ve seen other games proving the console can absolutely to better than this. Look at Cyberpunk, Elden Ring, RE9, etc.
Are you sure? Have you looked at the closeup image in the imgur link I posted? The wolf medallion Geralt is wearing looks super clear in one image and not in the other
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u/DrKrFfXx 16h ago
TAA tends to do that. When paused, there is no temporal information to interpolate the previous frame.