Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door Switch Frame Rate Revealed

I'm fine with both 30 & 60 fps. But not everyone is flexible like I am. I mean that's just facts & reality there. People have different preferences.

But one thing you can't deny is the visuals look heck as vibrant & pretty as it comes.

So I'm buying it. GC version is pricey as I don't know what.

That is quite disappointing, but not a deal breaker.

Disappointing? Yeah, but that’s not going to stop me from enjoying this masterpiece again.

Do people just not consider that they probably readjusted the game's input timing around the frame rate or

This isn’t new info. We knew this at the reveal of the game.

Funny enough, I watched a video with a side-by-side comparison of the footage long ago, rewound it 10 times, and it didn't really look like the movements were that much different from the original. But it seems to be officially confirmed now. Even so, the reason I'm okay with this is not for the same reason most are.

Most give it a pass because it's a turn-based RPG, but you also have to remember this game has timed combat, and the slower speed of the Superstar Saga remake did make pulling off bros attacks a tad more difficult. (Though it also doesn't help that they kinda messed up Splash Bros so you basically have to mash the B button to pull it off) The reason I'm okay with this is for the same reason I kinda love what they're doing with the visuals. Paper Mario has a hand-crafted aesthetic, and I kinda see the 30fps decision in a similar vain to the Lego movies having a lower framerate, and it seems like it was done to have the game move as if it was animated in stop-motion. I think it's kinda neat. (Also helps that it was clearly intentional and not a programming error)

Hopefully, it doesn't mess with the timed combat as from what I'm seeing, it looks as if they're making the action commands easier to pull off, but I didn't have too much of a problem with this when it was rumored, and I don't have too much of a problem with it now. And hey, if the article's to be believed, it is apparently consistent, so there shouldn't be a similar case to the Lava Piranha glitch in the Switch Online release for PM64. Seriously, that battle requires jumping, which is already harder to pull off than hammer attacks. How could you let that happen, Nintendo?

As for those who actually consider this a deal breaker, like this one change has completely ruined the remake for you, remember, this framerate was featured in the trailer, and when it came out, I'm 99% certain most if not all of you didn't even notice a lick of difference until the first article revealing this dropped. Clearly this is not as bad as you guys are making this out to be.

I guess the cut make sense considering if it means the game runs good with 30fps. Still if Metroid Prime Remastered could run at 60fps, there's no excuse for this. At least keep the in-game battles at 60fps, reducing it to 30fps means those time hits during battle won't perform as accurate like the original.

Well, I already have the GameCube version since August 2023 so I will have both GameCube and Switch version.

30 vs. 60 makes no practical difference, especially not in a turn-based RPG. So long as it's stable it's fine, especially when every other game in this series is 30 anyway.

RPGs unless it’s something really dynamic where these awesome cutscenes are taking place inbetween moves for special attacks I couldn’t really care about the frame rate as long as it isn’t under 30

@Lizuka No it makes a difference 60fps is prettier but 30fps still can look nice.

30 fps for a 20 year old game. That's a shame. At least I have the GameCube version.
I'll buy the Switch version, but I'm in no rush to pick it up now.

Been bummed since the first trailers revealed it was 30fps, especially considering the gorgeous SMRPG remake ran at 60fps.

Why you gotta go and get everyone worked up, NL?!
Personally, I don’t give a rat’s patoot. 60 is nice but I’ll mostly always prefer the 30 range as that is more cinematic, especially for cutscenes.

It's because TTYD remake runs on the same game engine as The Origami King and Color Splash, both of which were 30FPS.

@N00BiSH
This was one of the things i was curious about, especially with things like perfect guard.

mentioned it in the other topic but from what i hear perfect guards window in the original was 3 frames so i do wonder if it will remain 3 frames (making the window overall longer) or if it will be rounded down to 1 frame which would make it a LOT harder to pull off.

iirc perfect guard was a key part of the games skill ceiling which is why im interested to see how it turns out.

@Mgalens As far as I know, the controller polling rate doesn't need to match the screen refresh rate. They could keep the controls exactly like the original but only refresh the screen every other frame compared to the original.

Assuming it uses modern game engine approaches, the game runs at its own internal tick rate, which is separate from the rate at which it's rendering its frames (i.e. the FPS).

For the sake of argument, let's say you're playing a game blindfolded and are, somehow, capable of reproducing the exact movements and button presses, at exactly the same time. The outcome will be identical, regardless of which frame rate the game is rendering at. And it doesn't matter, because in this scenario you're blindfolded anyway.

To me, it's starting to feel disingenuous to start this FPS subject again. We know the Switch is underpowered, it's always been the underdog, yet people keep driving this subject into the ground.

If you're good at the game on 60FPS, you will be good at it on 30FPS as well.

Still have the GameCube version in storage somewhere. But I'm certain I'll enjoy it on Switch too. I'm not too fussed about framerates, but I am bothered about performance and framerate dips. As long as it's smooth 30FPS, then it's fine.

As I said yesterday, I do find it disappointing it is only 30fps especially as the original was 60fps so I can't see it as anything but a downgrade. Also IGN did report some stuttering in their preview which is doubly disappointing. Hopefully that was just a quirk in the version they played.

I will pick it up when it goes on sale but not paying full price. Got plenty to play in the meantime.

Running worse than the original is wild 💀

Well you could say this is intentional in prep for selling the switch 2 upgrade to 60fps? That would be classic Nintendo!

mmm didn't expect that... bit on the fence with this one to be honest.. some nice fan service things so physical would be nice... but I have it on nintendon't with the gc gamecube controller on the wiiu downstairs so i don't even have to fire up my original... will i be playing this or the original.....

@Yosher That seems like a bad faith characterization. People are allowed to expect better, especially in 2024, ESPECIALLY on a remaster of a GameCube game.

I mean, Metroid Prime Remastered is right there, at a perfect locked 60fps.

@PoeTheLizard Difference is that Paper Mario is a remake, not a remaster.

Metroid Prime is very much still a GameCube game, just upgraded for Switch. Paper Mario is built specifically for the Switch.

Expecting better is fine, but I've seen so many people going OH WOE IS ME over this whole 30FPS thing, making a much bigger deal out of it than it really needs to be.

Hmm.. Not sure if I'm a big fan of the style used here or the new remixed music. It reminds me too much of the previous three Paper Mario games which were absolutely awful. The FPS is not a problem for me, as long as it's consistent and doesn't drop

The game looks and runs great, judging by the trailers I have seen. Of course I would love 60.

I am sure I will enjoy the visuals while playing and I will not be bothered by the framerate.

I see some saying 30 on a 20 year old game but it’s not, it’s 30 on a new game because this is a remake.

It literally looks just as if not smoother than the original, some people are getting worked up over the numbers, not how it looks. It's crazy some people criticize this without even looking themselves and deciding themselves how smooth it is. Intelligent Systems did a wonderful job making this look 60fps even though it seems to run at 30, great job Nintendo!

Also if people can't play games at 30fps how can they watch TV shows and MOVIES which run significantly lower framerates?

What were people expecting? This is a remake, and is being treated as a NEW game. Breath of the Wild, Pikmin 4, Tears of the Kingdom, Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Paper Mario: The Origami King, and many more of Nintendo's recent titles are 30fps. It is not insane for Nintendo to be making this 30fps since it essentially is a new game.

I would like to point out that the article doesn't mention how the original TTYD didn't all run at 60fps and would sometimes lag/slow down. The original, when hundreds of characters on the screen, would make the characters super low res/low quality. The Remake fixes these issues almost entirely and it's super impressive. If the original couldn't keep 60, is it fair to expect the remake to? 30 FPS stable is way better than 60 FPS unstable.

No longer can people say it looks and runs like a Gamecube game

I mean, I can't even tell the difference between 30 and 60 unless they're side by side. Seems fine to me!

@PikminMarioKirby

What is crazy is those who just can't accept other people have a legitimate criticism of the game.

The difference between 30fps and 60fps is massive. Congrats to those who can't see the difference but to those of us who can then it is an issue.

There is also a tangible gameplay benefit as games control better with the increased framerate. Comparing playing a game to watching a tv show or movie is nonsensical.

Also when the original game did run at 60fps of course there is going to be disappointment the remake can't at least do the same.

I would much rather the focus was on getting the remake to run at a locked 60fps than a few fancy lighting effects, that would be a proper improvement on the original game.

And yes 30fps is perfectly playable, but nothing wrong with wanting more than that.

Doesn't affect me at all. I never played the original, so I have nothing to compare to.

@SBandy1 Fair take. I accept your opinion. I wasn't talking about anyone in particular, I was just saying in general there's a lot of people getting mad without looking to see how smooth it is themselves. It completely makes sense why some are disappointed by it.

That being said, I still believe a lot of people don't even know the issues that the original that had. The original TTYD had framerate drops and took several compromises to be 60 fps. The remake seemingly fixes those problems almost entirely by being 30fps. So, again, 30fps stable is better than 60 fps unstable.

Anyone who now thinks the game is ruined and unplayable due to a lower framerate shouldn't bother with quality in the first place.

I'll stick with the Gamecube version then. Don't see a reason to purchase a downgraded port when the original is already a flawless masterpiece. I just feel bad that the people who missed out on it the first time around still won't be able to experience it the way it was intended to be experienced back in 2004.

@PikminMarioKirby

Fair do's.

I do agree stable 30fps better than an unstable 60fps.

Yeah well as I've said already this is certainly not a deal breaker but there's no denying that any kind of downgrade from a 20 year old game to a modern remake really stings. I'll probably still buy it but the whole thing is kind of sad.

As far as I'm concerned if I decide not to buy it in the end it won't be because of the framerate but because I already played through SMRPG and Origami this gen and I'm kind of burnt out in the mario rpg front.

@SBandy1 Yes I think that's the one thing we all agree on lol

Personally, 30FPS is not an issue for me (the higher the better, but 30FPS is pretty standard - despite the odd naysayers that get worked up over this).

What is disappointing, is that the original game on hardware from 3 generations ago ran at 60FPS. It’s bizarre that Metroid Prime Remasted can handle 60, yet they couldn’t apply the same for this title as well which is arguably less action oriented.

On the plus, it looks GORGEOUS for a remaster/remake - so this sways me. At the very least I would hope they have updated and adjusted the input timings for the combat scenarios - that’s where the FPS argument really applies).

Nintendo is the only developer that can make a remaster that performs worse than the original and people still cream themselves over it.
I will wait to get a pre owned copy as I'm not supporting this.

@PikminMarioKirby In fairness though movies and TV shows are different from games. Games draw each frame like it's a stop motion animation, the more frames there are, the smoother the animation seems.

Films and TV shows capture motion blur from the exposure level which smooths the motion between frames. Plus of course, you're not playing a TV show so there's no downside to on-screen events taking longer to get to you.

Even with films though, higher frame rates can be desirable. The action scenes in Avatar 2 are 60fps and unlike something like Transformers or the Bourne films where the action scenes are smeary and hard to comprehend, all of the action in Avatar was very easy to follow.

@Chaotic_Neutral @accc I put together a list of pros/cons which may help put the remake in perspective!
https://www.nintendolife.com/forums/nintendo-switch/paper_mario_and_the_thousand_year_door?start=160#reply-170

And no this doesn’t run worse. It’s framerate isn’t as high but the resolution is significantly higher than the original. also it’s not a remaster, it is a remake which was confirmed a while ago.

@Sonicka Metroid Prime Remastered was a remaster, so 60 fps wasn’t that hard to achieve. TTYD is a remake with major changes and is graphically advanced compared to even new switch titles, so it can only run at 30.

@BulkSlash 60 fps is better than 30 for sure, although stable 60 isn’t really achievable for how these graphics are, and the original wasn’t always stable and took some compromises, so 30 being stable and fixing those problems was the better choice.

@PikminMarioKirby Very true, plus Paper Mario tends to have "jerky" animation anyway as the characters are meant to be a series of paper cut outs. I'd be interested to know how many frames are in Mario's walking cycle. If it's say 4 frames then there wouldn't be any visible difference from 60fps to 30 as the number of frames where he changes is less than the frame rate anyway.

Admittedly, scrolling/movement could be slightly jerkier, but even there, if the scroll speed isn't high then there wouldn't be much difference between 30 and 60.

The only place where frame rate could really hurt I think will be the timings in the battles. Hopefully Nintendo have mitigated that with some looser timings in which case it should all be good!

Do I really care, though? It's TTYD, for crying out loud!!

Definitely disappointing but not a deal breaker. I get it's a complete remake but is there really that much on screen compared to something like smash bros that this can't hold 60? I specifically wish battles were 60 due to the timing involved. Sure it looks great but so much better they needed to halve the framerate? The leap in technology vs what we're gettkng just doesn't add up for me.

I'll buy it pre-owned...

@SBandy1
honestly i feel like this articles comment section has fared better than the other one, it does feel like there's a lot more discussion regarding it including going into the technical aspects and less examples of people just dismissing criticism as people being "haters" "spoiled", "pretentious" etc. (though i didnt see what the deleted comments were)

@JohnnyMind
yeah those aspects are what i was curious about.
While i would have loved to have a "performance" mode i am happy that from the sounds of it the 30fps is stable and being a remake hopefully the timing will be made to work around the framerate.

So... why? The original was able to do 60fps no problem, plenty of other games are 60 and I really cannot see this game being very demanding on the actual hardware.

I can’t help but wonder what framerate this version would be on the Gamecube with all the effects turned on…?

Half the visual information being sent to your eyes than the original THREE console cycles ago. So tired of hearing it’s the Switch’s fault for being underpowered, they did not prioritize the right things in this game engine from the start.

One of my favorite games of all time, I own the original, and just can’t justify supporting this at full price. Intelligent Systems have fallen off so far this generation.

This is freaking Paper Mario, not F-Zero. 30 FPS is fine. Anyone bitching and moaning because "omg the original ran at sixty years ago..." quit whining. This is not the original. You want the original at 60 FPS? Go pull out your GameCube and play it, emulate it, whatever. Nintendo would probably be glad to sell you a nearly untouched port of the original running at 60 FPS, you wouldn't get the graphical overhaul or any of the other bells and whistles, but all you people whining about the framerate now would probably be even more repulsed by a more direct and otherwise untouched 60 FPS port. As it is, it appears to me to be a fine port.

@Qwiff We know the Switch is underpowered, yes, but it's still newsworthy when it can't even run an old game as smoothly as the GameCube did. (Tales of Symphonia is another, much worse example, as it doesn't even have enhanced graphics!)

And in general, it's good to know if a game runs smoothly or not. Many of us do notice the difference, and 30fps makes everything look and feel a lot worse. It would be easy to assume that an old game like this will run at 60fps on Switch, so it's helpful to see confirmation that it doesn't.

@PikminMarioKirby I've been seeing Metroid Prime: Remastered downplayed a lot. Its graphical engine and assets were completely rebuilt, so doesn't that satisfy the definition of a remake? And if not, how does TTYD qualify, when it seems to be the same thing (original game logic + all new graphics)?

Obviously, MP has "remastered" in the title, but let's not go there- we could be stuck for days, arguing over the definition of a "Remaster" vs a "Remarster" vs a "Reforge" vs a "Reload" vs a "Deluxe Director's Cut", etc. etc.!

EDIT: How many framerate drops did the original TTYD have, anyway? I can still remember the minor one when the camera turns around near the train, because it stood out as the one place where the game inexplicably struggled. And that's it! Even if the remake/refold/recut is 100% stable (which isn't guaranteed!), it's a stretch to claim that as any kind of victory over the original. (Those blurry sprites looked bad even on a CRT, though, I'll give you that!)

@smoreon You see, the difference is that Metroid Prime Remastered built off of the original's assets/code, while Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is built on new code and new foundations. Essentially, built from the ground-up while staying faithful to the original.

I am not quite sure about the original TTYD's framerate drops because I didn't really care/think about it when I was playing, but I've heard that it happens at a couple different parts in the game. The blurry/low res characters are seemingly completely fixed in the remake since it has more ease with 30fps.

Nintendo specifically has called this a remake and it's naming scheme is the same as their other remakes.

As someone who has some knowledge on coding, I know it would be almost impossible for it to be a remaster, as it would take so much work to re-work the game to 30fps (it would make the speed of the game inconsistent), and the graphics would be so painful to do with the old code (it's not just re-textured, it is somewhat new geometry/layout) so it would not be able to work the same without major programming/code changes. working with 20 year-old code you haven't touched since and trying to work with it is likely very difficult. Unlike new textures and stuff seen in Prime Remastered, as old code likely wouldn't have to be touched much to do that.

This also went all-out compared to Metroid Prime, whether some people like to admit it or not. This one added even more visual improvements, so far seems to be adding a lot more new content, the soundtrack is redone (and tons of completely new music is in the game), etc.

@PikminMarioKirby So I've heard, but it would be hard to prove that.
Unless Nintendo/Intelligent Systems lost the source code, it's much more likely that this is running most of the original game logic under the hood. Again, just like Metroid Prime, which keeps the game logic, but replaces the other assets.

@PikminMarioKirby Not sure if you knew this, but Metroid Prime Remastered also uses all-new geometry. TTYD might be a more extensive reworking, but I'm not seeing a world of difference between that and MP. All we can really do at this point is speculate as to what's under the hood, of course.

As to capping the game at 30fps, yes, it was common for Japanese devs to hard-code all kinds of stuff and tie the game speed to the framerate. However, changing all of the timings is still far less work than rebuilding a game of that scale from scratch, and we've seen this demonstrated with the likes of Skyward Sword (remaster is 60fps), Super Mario 64 (fanmade decomp is 60fps), and Tales of Symphonia (PS2 port is 30fps, as this apparently took much less effort than optimizing the engine or tweaking the assets).

Additionally, some engines, like Ocarina of Time, start with a high base rate, and then skip frames to meet a target rate: i.e., it's 60fps internally, but set to the number "2" that tells it to skip 2 frames and draw 1 (resulting in its actual 20fps rate). I suspect that this makes games easier to downgrade from 60 to 30, rather than the other way around (it still takes effort!), but I lack the in-depth knowledge to confirm the extent of that.

@smoreon I wouldn't call Metroid Prime's geometry 'all-new'. There may be very slight differences, but TTYD has some major geometry/layout changes such as the Blue Pipe Room.

Anyways, in the end it doesn't really matter. I think either way most people here are getting TTYD, framerate doesn't seem to look much worse if you watch the trailers.

@smoreon This is what frustrates me about people defending TTYD as a remake when we have Metroid Prime literally remaking the graphics and yet being dismissed as a simple remaster. The irony is that Metroid Prime: Remastered has a larger bump in lighting, effects, textures etc than what appears TTYD has, and yet Nintendo knows they need to bill TTYD as the remake in order to sell copies, because the Mario franchise is much more important than Metroid.

I'm not convinced at all that TTYD warrants the full price tag. The fact that they purportedly rebuilt the game from the ground up and still managed to cause the game to run more poorly and less optimized than the original is a glaring red flag.

If I could finish and enjoy Banjo-Tooie back in the day, I can live with a smooth 30fps ‘downgrade’ to replay this bad boy with a lovely new coat of paint.

@PikminMarioKirby I think you might be working with a different definition of "geometry". They literally remade the models and environments in MP- just look at any comparison screenshot, and the changes and enhancements will be obvious! (We are talking about the Switch version, right, not the Wii port?)

"Geometry" is simply any mesh/model: polygons grouped into shapes (e.g., Samus, a Space Pirate, the Tallon IV landing area, a tree, etc.). New models can be made without changing the layouts or the basic design of something.

@smoreon Yeah I meant more of the model shaping/proportions. Textures are redone in remastered but take the same proportions which means less actual code changes.

@Ulysses Idk if you’ve seen the original TTYD but TTYD has so many more lighting/reflection/art style changes than Prime Remastered had, idk you may be a bit bias with saying that.
If TTYD remake with a lot of new stuff isn’t worth 60 dollars than how is the original with less features and less consistent graphics worth $120-150? This is like half the price of the original. This pretty much had as much work as a new mainline Paper Mario game. This is genuinely one of the best games of all time, so much I’d say it’s better than any Switch exclusive (but that’s just my own opinion). It’s worth the 60$ price.
TTYD will not have trouble selling. It’s reputation is really high, and it’s Mario brand. And it is a remake with a lot of new graphical changes. Not trying to say Metroid Prime was a bad remaster (it’s impressive and should be the remaster standard!) but saying it’s more impressive than the TTYD remake is just completely out of the question

@PikminMarioKirby Well yes, of course I'm biased. Everyone brings with them their own personal mixture of biases. The truth is, everyone draws their own line in the sand.

And this is my own personal line: normally I don't like a strict graphics refresh. I've seen the comparison videos, and I appreciate the redrawn assets and updated lighting, etc etc. The graphics look nice, and as someone who's never played TTYD, I'm a prime candidate to buy this version.

However, I wasn't trying to say Metroid Prime Remaster is a more impressive remake/port than TTYD. I simply struggle to equate Metroid Prime's inherent value proposition with TTYD.

Metroid Prime was revered as one of the premiere games of its generation. And I've heard a lot about how great TTYD is, but the reality is that it's a niche spinoff within the Mario IP. Super Mario 3D World was deemed necessary to provide some extra content to help market its value proposition, and that's a mainline platformer.

I appreciate the work they've done on rebuilding the exact same game faithfully with a pleasant graphics refresh, but ultimately I can't help but smell a rush job. Nintendo realized they needed to delay the Switch 2 another year, and the TTYD was deemed one of the games that needed to be scrambled for a quicker takeoff than anticipated. Between the apparent reality that it doesn't offer any extra content and the fact that it comes with a performance downgrade, I'm just not feeling quick to purchase it for the Switch when I probably should wait for 60fps on the Switch 2 version. And yes, I don't care what anyone else says, in my own personal book, going from 60fps three generations ago to 30fps is an objective, inarguable downgrade in performance.

Maybe TTYD will be updated with a Switch 2 patch next year, maybe not. But at this point I feel like I probably can take that gamble and just wait and see.

Again, this is just my own take, because money's going to be a little tighter this year, and TTYD just doesn't grab me like other franchises. That's probably why the little issues I have with the remake seem bigger to me than to other people. And that's fine; I'm already seeing most of this year as a loss since I'm looking forward to the Switch 2. Why spend $200~ on end-of-life Switch games this year when I can save that money for exciting Switch 2 launch games next year?

@Ulysses Before you start judging the downgrade as "inarguable" and declaring the game a "rush job", you should perhaps take a look at the underlying technical reasons.

Allow me to explain.

Like I said in another thread, people don't appreciate the extra overhead that rendering in HD brings compared to SD. The Switch already has low memory bandwidth, so lighting effects like bloom (which typically require an extra render pass), only strain that bandwidth even more.

The GameCube original uses interlaced rendering, meaning it doesn't render the full 480p frame at 60fps. Arguably it's more accurate to say it renders two halves of its output at a rate of 30fps for each 240p half.

To put it in numbers:

GC: ~10Gb/s texture memory bandwidth
Switch: ~25Gb/s texture memory bandwidth

GC: 720 x 240 = 172800 pixels
Switch: 1280 x 720 = 921600 pixels

So, assuming it's rendering at 720p resolution, the Switch would have to render more than 5 times the amount of pixels, with only 2.5 times the memory bandwidth. And this example does not even take into account the extra resolution in docked mode. In turn, 1080p contains 2.25 times the amount of pixels of a 720p frame, just to put things even more in perspective.

In addition, for 2D/2.5D games there's little opportunity to use mipmaps to reduce memory bandwidth, because, being 2D, they render their textures at the same level of detail. 3D games can use lower resolution mipmaps for objects rendered farther from the camera. That also explains why Metroid Prime does manage 60fps.

Of course these are just rough estimates, but I just wanted to illustrate that memory bandwidth is almost certainly the deciding factor for the change to 30fps. Limits in memory bandwidth are also the reason for 30fps becoming the norm for most games, after consoles made the transition to HD. I.e. Xbox360/PS3.

@Qwiff

"Ofc"? "ballpark"?

@Mario500 ofc = of course, ballpark = estimate. edited the post.

I'll stick to the original modded on the steam deck then

As per preview footage, it's confirmed the game doesn't even maintain 30fps. It stutters when there are lots of characters on the screen, such as when Mario gets jumped by the X-Nauts.

Everything about this screams Link's Awakening (Switch) to me. A remake the game didn't really need that just makes it run worse.

It's very interesting how for the past decade programmers and developers have decreed optimization to be the lowest priority, next to selling to a certain demographic that must not be named.

@Qwiff Ah, that's a good reminder. Only 2.5 times more memory bandwidth between the Gamecube and Switch puts things into perspective. Thank you for sharing the context. Interlaced rendering helps lessen the blow to an extent. And my choice of words sounded more harsh than I intended. I certainly hope the Switch 2 fixes this shortcoming!

Maybe it'll run at 60 fps on the Switch2

I've been playing Paper Mario on the N64 app in anticipation for this. It seems to run at 30fps and feels fine. Honestly the Thousand Year Door visuals are so nice I'm pretty sure I won't mind the reduced fps.

There's no excuse after you see Super Mario Odyssey with dynamic 720p60.

@Denoloco There's a perfectly valid reason, and that's because Odyssey is a 3D game. Like I explained in my previous post, 3D games can take advantage of mipmapping to reduce memory bandwidth. Mipmapping means the game uses lower resolution textures the farther an object is placed from the camera. The lower the texture resolution, the less memory bandwidth it uses.

Games with detailed sprites in the foreground, like Paper Mario, cannot use this type of optimization. That also explains why relatively simple-looking 2D games can still have performance problems on Switch. The latest Contra being an example.

@jedgamesguy so many people on here seem not to care about that, it's strange. Questioning day 1 purchase on this one now.

@Beetlebum91 Don't wanna trash talk the remake but this is indeed a strange thing to happen, despite the excuses of complex lighting and effects that some may offer. I've seen tougher games run at 60.

@Qwiff
Fair enough, can't counter that logic. Well, at least it's a slower paced game. Unlike say a metroidvania like Zau at 30fps.

@Qwiff Yes, HD rendering is much heavier than SD, to the point that I even questioned if it was worth it on early HD-capable hardware. (Though Super Mario Odyssey was able to pull off 900p at 60fps!) A few issues with what you said about TTYD, though:

• Paper Mario: TTYD supports full 480p, like all Nintendo-published games of that era. It's most likely rendering internally at either 640x480 or 640x528, as a lot of GameCube games did (even on NTSC).
• Even if it was interlaced, that's still 60 unique renders, or frames of animation, that it has to generate. Though you acknowledge this with the estimate of 720x240, the reference to "30fps" just muddies the waters!
• 2D means less opportunity for low-res mip-maps, but it also offers a significant performance improvement by limiting where the camera can go: a player can't stand at the edge of the map and look across at the whole area at once, for example. The game only has to render a specific slice of the environment, and the devs know exactly what is being rendered. This surely outweighs any performance loss from higher mip levels!

Someone please explain to me why a game that ran at 60 FPS on the Gamecube (20 years ago) can't run at 60 FPS on the Switch.

@smoreon Good points! Thanks for sharing.

While it's true that a 2D game typically has to render a more limited slice of the game environment, this does not outweigh the performance loss of using hires textures. I.e. at mip level 0. This is because the vast majority of rendering time goes to the fragment processing stage. The vertex processing stage, basically the major difference between 3D and 2D scenes, takes much less time than you might think. In other words: rendering 2D scenes has little performance advantage over 3D, when large, hires textures are the only option available.

@Qwiff This makes a lot of sense for the Switch, considering that it's most often limited by bandwidth, from what I've heard. N64 would be another one- it has always been infamously more limited by fill rate (+ Z-buffering and other bandwidth-intensive stuff) than actual polygon counts, but I recently saw a YouTube video by Kaze (a very skilled Mario 64 fangame creator) that demonstrated just how extreme this can be in some cases!

That said, I've come across countless cases in video games, where large scenes with a lot of distant geometry (and by extension, lots of mip-mapping in play) will cause performance dips, whereas other scenes with full-quality textures prove to be no issue. It's complex, and no doubt depends on all kinds of factors, ranging from the hardware to the engine, the actual resolutions of the assets, the amount of overdraw, etc. etc.

@Crono1973 Because a lot of these "remasters" are done using AI upscaling to maximize profit (don't gotta pay AI) and not ig teams of people wanting to make it the best possible experience. They're not projects of love like the recent Star Ocean 2 remaster was. These are just to appease share holders and allow the fat cats at the top to afford a new mansion.

@smoreon Yeah, bandwidth really is the major shortcoming. The Switch is in the same league as PS3, which has a similar bandwidth of ~25Gb/s. PS4 increased the bandwidth to ~176Gb/s, showing that console makers recognized it was a bottleneck. It's unlikely we'll see a similar increase for the next Switch, since it's almost certainly a mobile chipset again. For reference, the latest iPhone tops out at just ~50Gb/s. Mobile chipsets are not gaming hardware.

@ndunsmo time based combat doesn't matter how much frame you put but is extremely important to be constant (aka locked), probably one of the reasons behind they choose to lock the framerate to 30 instead of 60. If you see even many modern games that run at 60 fps they struggle to keep the 60 constantly having some areas and certain part of the game with frame drops, those drops are usually not below 45 and are not perceptible for the gamer in terms of visual smoothness but for time base combat it can affect gameplay significantly