Does Switch's new Doom patch improve performance?
We like the Switch version of the Doom 2016. We respect its remarkable technological achievements and we're blown away by the fact that a playable version of this game exists at all for Nintendo's hybrid machine, but the fact is that the game has issues. The drop from 60fps to half-refresh was inevitable, but the impact to resolution and wobbly performance detracted significantly from the overall experience. Last week, developer Panic Button released a patch for the title and to say that people were excited about its potential would be a vast understatement - our social media was awash with demands to re-test the title, with many believing they were seeing some profound improvements in the revised code.
But what has actually been delivered? The patch notes suggest that developer Panic Button has 'increased the average resolution in lower-res areas of the game', which is a welcome upgrade. In shoehorning a modern game engine onto a mobile chipset, Doom's pixel-count is highly variable. Like for like comparisons in the most intense scenes aren't really possible, but we found some interesting data points nonetheless. Outside of combat, we actually found pixel-counts before higher and lower than the original release we tested, but in more challenging scenes, the game does appear to hit 720p while docked more often in situations where you might expect drops. However, drops to 648p are commonplace. In actual fact, Doom seems to scale both horizontal and vertical axes - it's a truly dynamic experience.
The point here is that while there is a difference, the perceptual effect is not significant - it's improved but it's still a very blurry game overall. It's even more difficult to determine in handheld mode but pixel counts do not suggest a transformative boost here. But that's not really the whole story. The fact is that this new patch does improve the experience and it's all about improved performance.
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