Final Fantasy 7 Remake dev talks about why Cloud’s hair can look jagged on Nintendo Switch 2
Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade director Naoki Hamaguchi has commented on the Nintendo Switch 2 version’s “hair problem”.
Differences in hair is something we’ve seen in some third-party ports for the system so far. With Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade, Cloud’s hair can sometimes look a bit jagged. According to Hamaguchi, the game uses temporal anti-aliasing, but “jagged edges in the hair become more noticeable” during busier moments in which the resolution drops.
Hamaguchi said the following in an interview with Automaton:
“This often comes up with other companies’ ports as well, and there’s a clear technical reason behind it. I’ll try to explain it as simply as possible.
In FFVII Remake, we use a technique called TAA (temporal anti-aliasing) to prevent character outlines from appearing jagged. TAA works by referencing not only the current frame being rendered, but also information from previous frames, layering them together to produce a smoother, near-high resolution image.
Now, hair is made up of extremely fine elements, so if you render it as-is, individual strands can flicker at the pixel level. To address this, we implemented a special process whereby each strand of hair switches on or off at the pixel level from frame to frame. When combined with TAA, this allows the fine lines of the hair to connect smoothly across frames.
However, Nintendo Switch 2 has a handheld mode, which comes with some extra constraints. To reduce processing load, there are situations where the game is forced to lower its internal resolution. When resolution drops, TAA becomes less stable, and the rough, jagged edges in the hair become more noticeable.
That’s not to say that handheld mode is always running at low resolution. In FFVII Remake, we use DRS (dynamic resolution scaling), which automatically adjusts the internal resolution between HD and Full HD depending on the load of each scene. To summarize:
High-load scene -> internal resolution drops -> hair is more likely to look jagged
Lighter scene -> internal resolution rises -> hair appears smooth
On Nintendo Switch 2, the basic mechanism is to lower internal resolution to maintain a stable frame rate, then compensate using DLSS. To briefly explain, DLSS uses AI to predict how the image “should” look and reconstructs it at near-high resolution.
DLSS is generally smarter than TAA at reconstruction, so even when internal resolution drops, the overall image can still look quite clean. However, as I mentioned earlier, our hair rendering switches individual pixels on and off each frame, and this doesn’t pair well with DLSS, which can result in jagged edges sometimes. While there are some inherent constraints to handheld hardware, we will continue optimizing to improve things as much as possible.”
Hamaguchi also recently commented on why Final Fantasy 7 Remake wouldn’t be possible on Nintendo Switch 2 without game-key cards. You can read about that here.
