The Impossible Port: Bringing Witcher III to Nintendo Switch

[Maddox]

A lot of old and new games are ported to Nintendo Switch; this talk will show that Switch is a capable platform that can run even the most demanding today’s games with little loss in fidelity. We describe in detail CPU, Memory and Build size optimizations and tradeoffs we made during the development of Switch version of Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt.

• upon starting, CPU game thread was 91ms
• CPU render thread with gpu wait time - 260ms
• GPU frame time 200ms
• 5GB of memory
• 46GB file size
• cloth physics moved from CPU to GPU
• Switch supports cuda natively
• audio was converted to Opus format
• the Opus decoder on switch handles 20 sounds simultaneously
• used oodle for asset compression as it was faster at decompressing than lz4
• used the sound streaming system developed for Cyberpunk 2077 to help save memory
• has 3 languages on cart instead of 4, used lower quality compression for lipsync
• final build size was 28GB
• 15 months of development
• SWitcher was literally the internal project name

GTC 2020: Witcher III on the Nintendo Switch: GPU & Memory Optimization

A lot of old and new games are ported to Nintendo Switch; this talk will show that Switch is a capable platform that can run even the most demanding today’s games with little loss in fidelity. We describe in detail CPU, Memory and Build size optimizations and tradeoffs we made during the...

developer.nvidia.com