Assassin's Creed Shadows targets 30FPS on the Switch 2 in docked and handheld

Ubisoft confirmed that it was bringing Assassin's Creed Shadows to the Nintendo Switch 2 with an announcement trailer published around a month ago, and with the release only a few days away, the publisher has revealed the graphical features and performance Switch 2 owners can expect from Shadows.

The Nintendo Switch 2 has a much smaller performance envelope than competing platforms, such as the Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC, and, due to its limited performance headroom, Ubisoft has had to make dramatic changes to Shadows to get it to run on Nintendo's latest handheld. According to Ubisoft's Project Lead Programmer, in many ways, Shadows has been redesigned for the Nintendo Switch 2, specifically in how the world is rendered, and many of the fundamental in-game systems.

Despite these changes, Ubisoft says it has maintained the core systems, such as clouds and cloth rendering, but they have been heavily optimized, meaning they have been downscaled to free up more hardware resources. Additionally, Shadows on the Nintendo Switch 2 will ditch ray-traced global illumination in favor of a baked solution used by lower-end PCs and the Xbox Series S, significantly reducing RAM usage.

Furthermore, Shadows will have reduced LOD, draw distances, texture resolution, and object streaming, and fewer NPCs in dense hubs. With all these cutbacks, and Ubisoft taking advantage of NVIDIA's DLSS to reduce the hardware's graphical load while maintaining moderately high visual fidelity, Shadows will target 30FPS on the Nintendo Switch - and that will be in both handheld and docked modes.