Fortnite finally arrived on Nintendo Switch this week, with developer Epic Games releasing it for download in the wake of Nintendo’s E3 Direct. It’s a title built with scalability in mind, capable of running on everything from an iPhone 6S through Xbox One X, right up to the world’s most powerful gaming PCs. And going into this one, we were fascinated to see just how much performance and fidelity Epic could extract from the Switch – after all, we’re looking at hybrid technology here, a machine built on a mobile chipset but with all the low-level access typically associated with a dedicated console.
The good news is that PS4 account login debacle apart, Fortnite on Switch links up perfectly with every other platform. Mechanically it’s the same game – as it must be to make cross-play possible – and the Unreal Engine 4 core translates neatly to Nintendo’s hardware. Inevitably, visuals and frame-rate take a hit as Switch’s mobile-orientated Tegra X1 SoC has considerably less horsepower on tap than the other current-gen consoles – but that’s really not the point, given it can be used as a handheld as well. The question is, to what extent do its nips and tucks matter to the competitive experience?
To answer that, we repeated the comparison process we used when we took a look at Fortnite’s iOS conversion, stacking up the new port against the best of the best from the console realm – the Xbox One X build. The first difference is plain to see: a drop from the 60fps common to all the other console versions to 30fps on Switch. The standard PlayStation 4 actually has the weakest CPU of the current-gen machines – with developers able to access six-and-a-half x86 Jaguar cores running at 1.6GHz. This is a big boost over Switch, where games only have access to three ARM Cortex A57s cores running at 1GHz. Clearly, something had to give.
Source: Eurogamer Fortnite's Switch port is impressive – but frame-rate could be better