Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door Might Have Shipped With 4K Mode For BC On Nintendo Switch 2

The remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door may have shipped with a 4K mode via backward compatibility on Nintendo Switch 2.

A datamine of the Switch version of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door has uncovered code for rendering at a resolution of 4K i.e. 3840 x 2160. Meanwhile, the frame rate code appears to be hard coded to 30 fps, though unlocking it would likely require changing the V-sync value and removing code that forces the delta time value to be above a certain threshold. In addition, the fixed time step for any physics logic may possibly need to be altered.

The code snippet above suggests that the Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door remake may already have been prepped with a 4K backward compatibility mode for Nintendo Switch 2. Earlier titles that don’t include code to support more powerful hardware may need to be patched to take advantage of the Switch successor.

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door isn’t the first Nintendo Switch title that appears to contain lines of code to scale performance on future hardware. An earlier datamine of the Arika developed Endless Ocean Luminous revealed that it uses an updated version of Nintendo’s internally developed Bezel Engine, which now appears to support higher frame rates up to 240 fps despite the Switch only being able to run games up to 60 fps.

Games running on prior versions of the Bezel Engine include both WarioWare titles, both Mario Party titles, Tetris 99, and some third-party Nintendo Switch titles. None of these games include code that indicates support for VRR or up to 240 fps. Therefore, the inclusion of both features appears to be very recent, and may have been done in preparation for enhanced backward compatibility support on the Nintendo Switch 2. Support for higher frame rates in the new version of the Bezel Engine is only enabled once the frame rate mode is changed from “Fixed” to “Variable”.