Nintendo Switch 2 Slammed for Poor Display–120 Hz with 30 FPS Response Times | Hacker News Reader

Nintendo Switch 2 Slammed for Poor Display–120 Hz with 30 FPS Response Times

techpowerup.com

21 pointskristianp28 comments

I would guess that the overlap between people deeply concerned about display response times and those excited to buy a Switch 2 is tiny. Most Switch buyers aren’t chasing cutting-edge codecs, they’re buying it for Splatoon, Zelda, Mario, and Animal Crossing. Nintendo’s audience has always prioritised unique first-party games and portability over hardware specs.

Speaking from experience, I've been thoroughly enjoying the Switch 2. Even if I knew about this information before I bought the console, it would not impact my purchase decision.

Nintendo owners do not care about tech specs - to them the games is what matters.

Specifically, are the games written in Rust? (jk)

This isn’t even funny, let alone relevant to the discussion.

> “ While testing was conducted at 60 FPS, the response times even fall short of this low bar, with 16.67 ms being the slowest response time required for the pixels to refresh between frames”

Well it’s actually 16.66 ms (1000 / 60). You can’t round up. A render loop that takes just a fraction more than the absolute minimum above would neck down to 30fps.

> Well it’s actually 16.66 ms (1000 / 60). You can’t round up. A render loop that takes just a fraction more than the absolute minimum above would neck down to 30fps.

This is about response time, not render loop time. Response time is the analog time required to transition a physical subpixel from one brightness level to another, usually measuring from when the transition starts. A 16.67 ms response time does indeed mean that with a 16.66(6) ms frame period it's still 0.003(3) ms away from completing the transition... but that just means that it's an immeasurable fraction away from the commanded brightness at that time, not that there will be rippling effects to the next frame or anything.

The comments on that article are wild. They're of people who seemingly play tech specs rather than actual games.

All that mixed in with plenty of people spouting some of the talking points about the screen protector, how the screen in supposedly fragile, etc. that also applied to the Switch OLED. All in all, a lot of unjustifiable, manufactured rage from people who neither own the console nor ever intended to get one.

For $500, were people expecting to put an LG G5 in their backpacks?

Also, I know that we don't editorialise titles on HN, but I wish we could for this: "30 FPS response times" comes directly from the article, but they mean "30 ms", not "30 FPS".

The Switch 2 LCD is too slow to actually display 120 frames a second. And it is noticeably smeary. It really isn't acceptable in 2025

The "30FPS" part is about how 1/0.030s = 33.33. The article also says "While testing was conducted at 60 FPS, the response times even fall short of this low bar, with 16.67 ms being the slowest response time required for the pixels to refresh between frames such as to avoid blur or smearing." Tbh I don't understand this, I thought refresh rate and response time were totally independent, but 1/0.01667 = 60.

And yeah people complaining about Nintendo hardware is an old thing. Wii can't play BluRay, GameCube can't play DVD, N64 not enough RAM, and before that games/consoles were compared by data bus size. Doesn't really matter usually, except some N64 games were annoyingly laggy like 007 GoldenEye.

I think the point is that if you've got a 120Hz refresh rate but a 30ms response time, the slow response time negates a lot of the benefit of the high refresh rate. You end up with a sliding window of 4 frames of video smeared together.

Ah I misunderstood what response time even is. I thought the whole screen is updating 120 times per second but it's delayed by 30ms, so it looks the same but you perceive input lag. That's not how it works.

> Tbh I don't understand this, I thought refresh rate and response time were totally independent, but 1/0.01667 = 60.

They are, and I also feel like people don't really understand what response time means: It's the time for the pixel to transition from one color to another. More precisely, it's the time to transfer some percentage of the way to the second color. Since the pixel tends to asymptotically approach the destination color, so you get more than 50% of the transition when 50% of the "response time" has passed.

You can have a 240 Hz refresh rate with a 16ms response time. It just means that the pixel won't fully transition to the destination color before it is updated again. So black-white-black-white would look more like black-grey-darkGrey-lightGrey.

Another thing is that if you show people (humans) alternating black and white frames at 240Hz, it's going to look grey anyway.

Thanks, the technical distinction makes sense now, but also it seems like the real rate most people care about should be 1 / (response time).

I don't think people are expecting to put an LG G5 in their backpacks, but shouldn't the average display response time be at least better than its predecessor released 8 years ago?

I dunno, Nintendo is going out of their way to promote >60hz >1080p games and HDR.

They care about the people that care about that. The people who care about that care about display latency and ghosting too. The screen is significantly worse than the predecessor in the latency aspect while they market it as being so much better.

If anything display latency and ghosting is more important than upscaling 1080p and HDR.

At least they do make a clear distinction of OLED vs non-OLED because that is another big point and at least the marketing is not deceiving on that front.

I was going to say this too because of friends who told me they care about the screen, but then I looked at Nintendo's own marketing for this, and I only see minor mentions of "better performance." Like the promo video is mostly about Mario Kart 9 or whatever.

An LCD with a claimed refresh rate of n hertz really is implied to have a max GtG latency of 1000ms / n. Anything higher seems dishonest and rather stupid.

It seems like a headless Nintendo Switch 2 that was -$100 might sell a lot of units.

You might be looking for an Nvidia Jetson Orin Nano, which is the dev board version of the switch 2 base chip. Nvidia sells them for $249.

How is that anything like a Switch 2? It can't play the games, which is the entire point.

I wanted that for the switch 1, and then Nintendo started selling a lite with no dock instead. Probably most other people use their switches differently than I do. I guess you could get a switch that someone broke the screen, maybe for $100 less.

I would guess majority of Switch audience is very young and won't care.

It's hard to find reliable data but it seems most Switch 1 players (not just owners) are in the 20-30 demographic: https://www.shacknews.com/article/127542/nintendo-discloses-...

Although Nintendo is still clearly targeting families relative to XBox/Sony, the Switch itself has a lot of adult games (e.g. the Cyberpunk port).

According to slide 8 that’s not the case at all.

https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2021/211105e.pdf

What if the adult creates the account and them gives the switch to a kid? How would Nintendo know who is playing.

Ai answer for definition of 'annual playing users' as per that slide:

Nintendo defines *"Annual Playing Users"* as the number of unique users (based on Nintendo Accounts registered to Switch systems) who played software on the Nintendo Switch during a given 12-month period. This metric includes all active players across age groups and regions, regardless of whether they share a single console or own multiple units.

### Key Details: 1. *Scope*: Counts users who engaged with any Switch software within a year, not tied to hardware sales (e.g., one console can have multiple players) . 2. *Growth Trend*: Nintendo reported *129 million Annual Playing Users in 2024*, up from 127 million in 2023, reflecting sustained engagement despite the Switch’s aging lifecycle . 3. *Demographics*: Includes a broad age range (kids to seniors) and a near-even gender split (50/50 male/female) . 4. *Exclusions*: Does not differentiate between casual or frequent players—only active participation in the year is required .

This metric helps Nintendo gauge platform engagement beyond raw hardware sales, emphasizing its hybrid model’s shared-use potential .

Notice how there's a big spike at age 21. Slides were made in 2021. How many Switch owners were supposedly born on 1/1/00?

That and any young kids are less likely to be setting it up themselves.

If the response time is really 33ms, maybe they'd be able to tell playing Super Smash Bros. I remember as a kid wondering why Melee felt so weird on one TV.

Checks out

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