In terms of image quality, Switch's docked mode offers up a 1080p resolution, which drops down as low as 936p under load. Assassin's Creed 2 and Brotherhood very rarely deviate from 1080p, but Revelations does tend to cut resolution in some shots, particularly in long views of the city. 1080p is achieved most of the time and the image looks sharp and detailed for a Switch title. Revelations shores up the presentation with a post-process anti-aliasing technique, while AC2 and Brotherhood operate without anti-aliasing of any kind.
This is a little odd, as the 2016 Ezio Collection used a post-process effect for all titles, and the original releases of Brotherhood and AC2 used 2x MSAA on Xbox 360. Portable mode employs a similar setup, although the results are a bit more variable. The resolution target is cut to 720p, with lows around 540p. Resolution takes a dive more often here, particularly in Revelations and Brotherhood. City shots are the biggest offenders in Revelations, while crowd scenes and cinematics tend to reduce resolution in the prior titles.
This is complicated slightly by Ubisoft's approach to image scaling. When Ezio Collection drops resolution, it scales the image back up without using linear filtering, and instead appears to be using nearest neighbour filtering. This tends to exaggerate the appearance of resolution drops by introducing uneven scaling artefacts, although image sharpness is better preserved. This applies to both portable and docked modes. A more conventional approach to image scaling would have been best I feel, as this tends to distract. When portable mode is operating at native res, though, these games look great on the internal Switch display. AC2 and Brotherhood stand out in particular and look super-sharp owing to their lack of anti-aliasing.
Performance is mostly positive. Docked mode operates at a solid 30fps across all titles, with dips only in rare circumstances. Character close-ups in a few cutscenes in Assassin's Creed 2 pull frame-rates briefly into the high 20s, and walking around in Constantinople in Revelations can see similar dips on occasion. Many of the dips are momentary and seem to be caused by lag in the dynamic resolution system - once resolution stabilises, frame-rates usually recover to 30fps. Portable mode fares somewhat worse. The same spots that cause performance issues in docked play still drop frames here, and some action-heavy scenes also seem to cause problems. Revelations is the worst offender here, though all of the games exhibit these issues to one degree or another. Portable play is still far more stable than the shaky 30fps of the original games on Xbox 360, but isn't quite delivering the same consistency of the docked version.
