Can Crimson Desert run on Switch2? Is 30 fps the bare minimum?

It runs, but don’t pop the champagne just yet.

Pearl Abyss has confirmed that development on a Switch 2 version of Crimson Desert is underway, which in itself isn’t surprising. Every major title today wants a piece of the handheld market, and nobody wants to leave that meat on the table. But judging by the hardware match-up, this won’t be easy to pull off—the wind-up will be long, and the finish may not be clean either.

According to information relayed by overseas outlet wccftech, Digital Foundry’s take was straightforward: with NVIDIA DLSS, the Switch 2 has a chance of getting Crimson Desert to 30 fps while keeping the visuals at a passable level. But the issue is right there on the table—if it wants to hold a steady 30 fps, the resolution will most likely need to be cut quite noticeably. It’s like trading range for hit detection in a fighting game: you can still connect, but the feel will definitely involve compromises.

Now let’s talk about the point of reference. The report suggests that the Xbox Series S is the closest match to the Switch 2 in terms of specs, so the performance of the Series S version is highly relevant. More importantly, experts pointed out that the minimum PC requirements have already been made clear, and when the Series S runs the game at 720p, many settings have to be pushed down to the lowest. That suggests Crimson Desert is not the kind of game that goes easy on resources, and bringing it to Switch 2 will come with serious optimization pressure.

The real trouble may not even be the GPU, but the CPU. Digital Foundry zeroed in on this point: the Switch 2 version’s CPU risks becoming a bottleneck. In some scenes, even if the graphics side can still hold on, the CPU may max out first. Using areas like Anthill as an example, the developers may have no choice but to reduce NPC counts or shorten NPC draw distance in exchange for stability.

This approach is actually nothing new—it’s very similar to the route The Witcher 3 took when it came to Switch. It’s not about simply chopping visual quality across the board, but performing targeted surgery on CPU-heavy elements and trimming the parts that hurt frame rate the most. Put plainly, if the Switch 2 version of Crimson Desert wants to lock 30 fps, lowering NPC density may be the key move. It’s not the prettiest solution, but it’s practical—the kind of play where you secure the points first and worry about style later.

On top of that, DLSS really is one of the Switch 2’s biggest technical trump cards this time around. Compared with the Xbox Series S and Steam Deck, it has more room to work with in low-resolution reconstruction, and at the very least it can pull things back a bit from looking too blurry. So if you care mainly about the handheld experience and aren’t obsessing over native high resolution, this version may still be perfectly playable. Especially since Crimson Desert doesn’t seem to have an especially explosive pace—it’s not the kind of high-speed action game where a frame drop instantly breaks your combo.

But my buying advice is simple: don’t rush in at launch. Watch real gameplay first, then check the frame-time graph, then see how NPCs behave in towns and large-scale scenes. If it ends up being 30 fps only on empty maps and starts to sag as soon as you enter crowded areas, then this version can only be considered passable. If you care about visual completeness and stable performance, the PC version still looks more like the main-event platform; if what you want is to take it on the go and casually work through the game, then the Switch 2 version becomes worth discussing.

One last thing: the industry signal coming out of this news is very clear. Whenever new hardware arrives, third-party blockbusters will all try to pile on, but whether they can actually stick the landing comes down to optimization chops, not slide-deck specs. For Crimson Desert, if the Switch 2 version wants to win, it won’t be through flashy talk—it depends on whether Pearl Abyss can turn this port into a real combo.