Ahead of Stellar Blade‘s arrival on Switch 2, there’s a demo allowing you to get an early taste of the port. By and large, it’s exactly what you’d expect – but developer Shift Up has had to make some notable compromises to get the game running on the portable hardware. The game’s forced use of frame generation has been the cause of some controversy, but thankfully, the devs have taken the feedback to heart and intend to make it optional.
“Thank you to everyone who has played the Stellar Blade Complete Edition demo on Nintendo Switch 2 so far,” Shift Up says in a tweet. “We’ve been watching your feedback closely and decided to add a Frame Generation toggle at release. We hope this lets you play the way that looks and feels best to you!”
Stellar Blade targets 60fps on Switch 2 through a combination of DLSS upscaling – which, importantly, is not the same thing as the controversial DLSS 5 tech Nvidia is now pushing – and frame generation. The underlying game is actually running at 30fps, but frame generation creates extra frames that make it look as if it’s running at 60fps.
Frame gen can look good, but with the actual game still running at 30fps, it doesn’t feel any more responsive to play. In fact, since frame generation consumes additional system resources, it can actually add input lag, and this is where Stellar Blade’s Switch 2 problems begin.
The Switch 2 version of Stellar Blade feels downright sluggish to play. Your mileage may vary depending on how sensitive you are to input lag, but spending a few minutes with the demo myself, I found it very difficult to get the parry timing down right even against the tutorial enemies. It felt like I was mailing in my button press and waiting a few business days for Eve to respond. Immediately afterwards, I fired up the PC version, capped it to 30fps, and found those same parries to be a relative cakewalk.
There are also some pretty severe visual issues with the Switch 2 version. Eve’s hair looks more like a particle storm than a ponytail, with a distracting swarm of errant pixels whenever she’s on-screen – which is most of the game. And despite the Switch 2 version’s 60fps appearance, the UI still updates at only 30fps, which makes for an annoying disconnect between things like enemy health bars and the actual action.
It’s not ideal, and as the Digital Foundry video above explains, these visual quirks are consistent with similar artifacts that frame gen can create on other platforms. Yes, it’s a lot more pleasing to the eye to see the game appear to run at 60fps, but there are so many compromises I think I’d prefer to turn it off in the end. Thankfully, Shift Up has seen the light and is offering an option to do exactly that, and I hope every dev that considers frame gen on console will follow suit.