4J Studios, the people who are responsible for getting Minecraft over to consoles, have recently spoken to TIME about how they bumped up the performance for Minecraft on Switch; allowing players to play the game at 1080p whilst docked. 4J Studios’ CEO, Richard Reavy explained:
“We did spend some time analyzing our GPU usage and optimizing things before we did this move as well,” he says. “We needed to spend some time looking at the fill rate and being more careful with that, just because of the number of pixels in 1080p. We kind of knew we could do the optimization and we would get there with the performance. But yeah, ultimately, the fundamental problem was switching resolution.”
Reavy goes to on to talk about how each different version of Minecraft has a custom interface to suit the resolution of the console it’s being played on. Switching between docked and undocked mode at any given time could have caused some issues so the team got to work on bringing us an update.
“Every interface seam is handcrafted by our art team to suit the exact resolution of the console it’s on,” says Reavy. “We wanted to make sure the transition was really slick, and that the user wouldn’t notice anything, like it taking seconds unloading one user interface system for another,” he says. “And also because you can dock and undock your console at any point, it can be quite problematic that the user could switch the console at a really inopportune moment.”
4J Studios Explain How They Got Minecraft On Switch To Work In 1080p When Docked