Nintendo Switch 2 Slammed for Poor Display–120 Hz with 30 FPS Response Times

The comments on that article are wild. They're of people who seemingly play tech specs rather than actual games.

All that mixed in with plenty of people spouting some of the talking points about the screen protector, how the screen in supposedly fragile, etc. that also applied to the Switch OLED. All in all, a lot of unjustifiable, manufactured rage from people who neither own the console nor ever intended to get one.

For $500, were people expecting to put an LG G5 in their backpacks?

Also, I know that we don't editorialise titles on HN, but I wish we could for this: "30 FPS response times" comes directly from the article, but they mean "30 ms", not "30 FPS".

The "30FPS" part is about how 1/0.030s = 33.33. The article also says "While testing was conducted at 60 FPS, the response times even fall short of this low bar, with 16.67 ms being the slowest response time required for the pixels to refresh between frames such as to avoid blur or smearing." Tbh I don't understand this, I thought refresh rate and response time were totally independent, but 1/0.01667 = 60.

And yeah people complaining about Nintendo hardware is an old thing. Wii can't play BluRay, GameCube can't play DVD, N64 not enough RAM, and before that games/consoles were compared by data bus size. Doesn't really matter usually, except some N64 games were annoyingly laggy like 007 GoldenEye.

I think the point is that if you've got a 120Hz refresh rate but a 30ms response time, the slow response time negates a lot of the benefit of the high refresh rate. You end up with a sliding window of 4 frames of video smeared together.

Ah I misunderstood what response time even is. I thought the whole screen is updating 120 times per second but it's delayed by 30ms, so it looks the same but you perceive input lag. That's not how it works.

I don't think people are expecting to put an LG G5 in their backpacks, but shouldn't the average display response time be at least better than its predecessor released 8 years ago?

The Switch 2 LCD is too slow to actually display 120 frames a second. And it is noticeably smeary. It really isn't acceptable in 2025

> Tbh I don't understand this, I thought refresh rate and response time were totally independent, but 1/0.01667 = 60.

They are, and I also feel like people don't really understand what response time means: It's the time for the pixel to transition from one color to another. More precisely, it's the time to transfer some percentage of the way to the second color. Since the pixel tends to asymptotically approach the destination color, so you get more than 50% of the transition when 50% of the "response time" has passed.

You can have a 240 Hz refresh rate with a 16ms response time. It just means that the pixel won't fully transition to the destination color before it is updated again. So black-white-black-white would look more like black-grey-darkGrey-lightGrey.

Another thing is that if you show people (humans) alternating black and white frames at 240Hz, it's going to look grey anyway.

I dunno, Nintendo is going out of their way to promote >60hz >1080p games and HDR.

They care about the people that care about that. The people who care about that care about display latency and ghosting too. The screen is significantly worse than the predecessor in the latency aspect while they market it as being so much better.

If anything display latency and ghosting is more important than upscaling 1080p and HDR.

At least they do make a clear distinction of OLED vs non-OLED because that is another big point and at least the marketing is not deceiving on that front.

I was going to say this too because of friends who told me they care about the screen, but then I looked at Nintendo's own marketing for this, and I only see minor mentions of "better performance." Like the promo video is mostly about Mario Kart 9 or whatever.

Thanks, the technical distinction makes sense now, but also it seems like the real rate most people care about should be 1 / (response time).