Digital Foundry does a tech breakdown for Super Mario RPG

Nintendo’s 1996 collaboration with Square yielded the excellent Super Mario RPG for the Super NES and now, decades later, the game has been remastered into full 3D for Nintendo Switch. In the video above, Digital Foundry’s John Linneman goes back to the original, stacks it up against the new game, then critiques it on its own merits as a 2023 Switch release.

If you’re looking to get a breakdown of all the technical aspects of Super Mario RPG on Switch, you can see the finer points in the bullet point rundown below.

• built from the ground up using Unity Engine
• entire game world is now rendered fully in real-time 3D
• videos in the game run at 60fp
• uses planar reflections
• shadows without the usual pixelation or filtering issues
• textures are super sharp
• loading is ultra-fast, sometimes even beating the Super NES original
• 720p in portable and native 1080p in docked mode
• dynamic res scaling doesn’t seem to be used and anti-aliasing is largely absent
• maintains its target of 60 frames per second at nearly all times
• when it does drop frames, frame-times are wildly unstable and the whole image feels jerky