Believe it or not, Square Enix didn’t exactly deliver a flawless port for Nintendo’s console that launched last June…

Last week, the 2020 Final Fantasy VII Remake finally landed on Xbox Series and Nintendo Switch 2. Based on the demo, early impressions of the Nintendo Switch 2 version were broadly very positive. Digital Foundry’s breakdown, however, suggests the most impressive new release is actually the one running on Xbox Series S. Throughout this generation, developers have often criticized Microsoft’s cheaper Xbox Series console for hardware compromises, especially around RAM. And despite the fact that Nintendo Switch 2 has more memory available to games (9 GB versus 8 GB on Microsoft’s machine), Final Fantasy VII Remake still shows stronger texture quality on Microsoft hardware.

Where the Nintendo Switch 2 version appears to blend assets from the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 releases, Xbox Series S uses the full asset quality seen on Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. Digital Foundry speculates that Xbox Series S pulls this off despite having less RAM thanks to CPU-assisted texture streaming, driven by a custom 8-core AMD Zen 2 chip that’s very close to the big sibling’s CPU, just at slightly lower clocks. By contrast, the Nintendo Switch 2 CPU, the ARM Cortex-A78C, is noticeably less capable. The GPU’s Nvidia DLSS support is a theoretical advantage, but it doesn’t move the needle here.

The visual settings used on Xbox Series S (for example, shadow quality) sit somewhere between the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 versions. In terms of resolution and frame rate, Xbox Series S owners can pick between 1080p/60 FPS and 1440p/30 FPS. Xbox Series X, meanwhile, targets the same output as the Final Fantasy VII Remake PlayStation 5 release (1512p/60 FPS in Performance mode, and 2160p (native 4K)/30 FPS in Quality mode).

So yes, the little brother turned in a genuinely impressive showing.

Forrás: WCCFTech, Digital Foundry