With Rayman Legends Retold, Ubisoft is looking forward to bringing major upgrades to the platformer’s visual fidelity. Despite this, however, the company is confident about how well the title will perform on the Nintendo Switch 2 despite the console’s lack of raw horsepower when compared to PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. In an interview with VideoGamesChronicle, Ubisoft Montpellier’s technical director, Thibaut Assandri, spoke about the game’s performance, its visual fidelity, and how it was developed for the Nintendo Switch 2.
One of the biggest features available on the Nintendo Switch 2 that isn’t on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S will be the unique version of Nvidia’s DLSS for image upscaling. Assandri noted that the technology has worked quite well, even allowing the company to output the title at full 4K when the console is docked, since power consumption isn’t a concern at that point. DLSS has helped the Nintendo Switch 2 version of Rayman Legends Retold to be “quite on par” with the Xbox Series S in terms of visual fidelity and performance, he said.
“The DLSS is working quite well, as you can see,” said Assandri, “When it’s docked, it’s full 4K because we don’t have to care about power consumption, so we can go a bit higher. Essentially, on Switch 2, we are quite on par with the Xbox Series S [version in terms of] quality.”
There were plenty of technical decisions made to ensure that Rayman Legends Retold would run well on Nintendo Switch 2, especially when it comes to more resource-intensive techniques like ray tracing. Since Ubisoft Montpellier is aiming to run the title on Nintendo’s hybrid console at 60 FPS, it had to work hard to ensure that Ubisoft’s in-house Snow Drop engine was up to the task.
“As you might know, ray tracing is quite costly,” he said, “ [In Star Wars Outlaws on Switch 2], they deal with it by running at 30 FPS, but we are aiming for 60 on all platforms, from the most humble – Switch 2 – to the most high end, a PS5 Pro, or high end PC – so it was quite a challenge… we [had] to really push the limit of Snow Drop from 30 FPS to 60.”
“One of the tricks we used to reach that quality is to lower the resolution. For most of the GPU [resources] it depends on the resolution, so the more we reduce resolution, the less costly it will be.”
Among the tweaks made to the Snow Drop engine involved changing things that weren’t quite needed for Rayman Legends Retold. Since the engine was designed around rendering massive open worlds for Ubisoft’s other games, Assandri noted that the team had the freedom to change things like how level of detail is calculated.
“We develop a thing where the level of detail is not based on distance [from parts of the environment] but it’s based on ratio and scale,” he explained. “So, depending on the size of the character on screen, it will change the level of detail accordingly to that… the amount of detail that we have on PS5 is approximately the same as on Switch 2.”
These decisions ultimately helped the studio ensure that it could target 60 FPS at the same resolution on all platforms, regardless of the number of players on the screen.
Rayman Legends Retold is slated for an October 1st release on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2.
