Capcom has been a big supporter of the Switch 2 in its first year, bringing over a litany of titles that are not only fun to play, but really showcase the power of the platform. A lot of these impressive technical achievements come from Capcom’s own RE Engine, which seems to be incredibly scalable. A number of Capcom’s Switch 2 titles make use of the RE Engine, including Resident Evil Requiem, Monster Hunter Stories 3, PRAGMATA and so on. These (and other) RE Engine titles really sing on Switch 2, but it turns out there’s a way to boost their performance even more.
While far from an intended feature, it appears that there’s an odd hiccup with the RE Engine on Switch 2. Before the Switch 2 released, Nintendo warned developers that their games could end up taking a performance hit due to the platform’s GameChat feature. This meant devs would have to keep in mind how their titles would perform during GameChat sessions versus standard play. Obviously this requires some planning and optimization, but most games seem to handle GameChat just fine. In the case of RE Engine games, things can actually get better!
As discussed by the Digital Foundry gang, they’ve confirmed that RE Engine titles on Switch 2 do indeed run even better when GameChat is in use, but there’s a caveat. It all depends on your screen size when you’re using GameChat. To simplify things, when you use a smaller gameplay window in GameChat, as the app allows you to adjust between full screen and other options, the framerate can increase…and quite exponentially.
As you can see in the clip below, some Capcom RE Engine titles see framerate boosts of up to 10, if not 20 frames versus the normal baseline during gameplay without GameChat. The tradeoff is that you have to play in the smaller windowed mode, but with how seriously some people take framerates, there’s probably a noteworthy chunk of Switch 2 players out there who’ll happily play in a smaller window if it boosts the frame output.