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The heist is on! Payday 2 has arrived on Nintendo Switch, making it by default the first truly portable version of the game. Based on the editions released for PS4 and Xbox One three years ago, the port goes further, incorporating a wireless four-player option for nearby Switch users, along with other tweaks and DLC added since its last-gen launch. In most other respects, the game's core remains the same as before, which begs the question - to what extent can Nintendo's hybrid match the 1080p30 experience of the existing current-gen versions?Obviously, we are dealing with a significant power differential between Switch and its established counterparts - tweaks to graphical settings are commonplace in Switch ports and there sometimes there are performance compromises too. To start, Switch runs at 1600x900 while docked. In itself, that's a pretty good showing, and it looks fine while connected to a HDTV. Any resultant jaggies from the resolution downgrade are mostly resolved via a strong post-process anti-aliasing, meaning that it's softer next to the direct competition, but it's hard to complain, especially when other ports have delivered a much lower 720p pixel-count.
Running at a lesser 900p is fine on its own, but even in docked mode, the quality of most the other visual features is either dropped or disabled outright. Take anisotropic filtering, for example. This is one of the oddities of the existing versions: it's fully maxed at 16x anisotropic filtering or close to it on Xbox One, but reduced to a mere trilinear implementation on PS4. Switch inherits that low quality texture filtering of the Sony version - an approach that muddies ground textures. There's a double-whammy here in that the core texture quality itself is downgraded on the Nintendo machine too: fine for handheld play, not so impressive when docked.
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