The latest video game release tackled by the tech-focused team at Digital Foundry is the highly anticipated remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. The team was left quite impressed with what Nintendo achieved with the remake despite running at 30fps as opposed to the original’s 60fps. However, when it comes to frame rates, Digital Foundry says that the Switch remake delivered a “nearly locked 30 frames per second during our testing. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door runs at 900p when played in docked mode and 640p when played in handheld mode. Here are some excerpts from their description of the game:
This visual overhaul of the Switch Edition goes much further than I expected, though it largely retains the core gameplay loop, level layout, puzzles, and dialogue of the GameCube original. Textures on almost every visible point in the world on the Switch version have been reworked, while UI elements have been reworked to suit modern TVs. Geometry is rebuilt from scratch for each level – even 2D sprites are swapped out for full 3D replacements, often with the aim of accentuating the cardboard cut-out effect. A huge amount of extra detail has been built in. Most importantly, what’s here is still true to the spirit of the original, even if the textures and geometry have been redesigned.
To cram in all these visuals – updated textures, lighting, shadows, SSR and more – the Switch runs at a native resolution of 1600×900 while docked. In manual mode, this drops to a lower native figure of 1138 × 640. As we’ve often come to expect from Nintendo titles, there’s limited anti-aliasing here, so you may notice a slight shimmer over white character outlines. Despite the relatively low internal resolution numbers here, the game still looks nice on modern screens – it’s a proper widescreen adaptation, with a refined UI and text to boot.
Finally, let’s address that drop from 60fps on GameCube to 30fps on Switch. The visual upgrades are extensive and generous, but the performance cost is noticeable. The question is: is this too much of a sacrifice for improved visuals or a reasonable compromise to run the game at this level of visual fidelity? In the developer’s defense, frame delivery is at least consistent at 33.3ms with almost no deviation, delivering a near-locked reading of 30fps during our testing.
