Digital Foundry's analysis reveals a fascinating quirk: enabling Nintendo Switch 2's GameChat mode makes Resident Evil Requiem run significantly faster, thanks to the RE Engine's dynamic resolution scaling.
In what might be one of the most unexpected technical discoveries of the Nintendo Switch 2 launch window, Digital Foundry has uncovered a peculiar performance behavior in Resident Evil 9: Requiem — the game actually runs 10-20 frames per second faster when players activate the console's new GameChat feature.
The finding is particularly striking because it's the complete opposite of what Nintendo warned developers about. The company had cautioned studios that enabling GameChat would consume system resources and could negatively impact game performance, much like background apps on other platforms. But Capcom's RE Engine, known for its aggressive and intelligent dynamic resolution scaling, appears to subvert this expectation in a clever way.
Here's what's actually happening under the hood: when GameChat is active on the Switch 2, it overlays a small floating window on the screen — typically showing a friend's face or shared content. To accommodate this overlay, the system effectively reduces the game's rendering viewport. The RE Engine, designed to maintain smooth performance above all else, interprets this smaller rendering area as a cue to target a lower internal resolution.
This resolution drop — which Digital Foundry's tools confirmed in the range of roughly 20-25% fewer pixels being pushed per frame — frees up substantial GPU headroom. On a platform where every millisecond of rendering time counts, that breathing room translates directly into a tangible 10-20 FPS improvement over the standard docked or handheld modes.
The boost is most noticeable in RE:9's more demanding areas, such as the dense urban environments of the game's early chapters and the chaotic boss encounters later on. In these scenes, the standard mode can occasionally dip into the mid-20s FPS range, but with GameChat active, the frame rate stays comfortably in the upper 30s and sometimes touches 40 FPS — a difference that players will feel as noticeably smoother gameplay.
It's worth noting that this isn't a "cheat code" or an exploit in the traditional sense. Rather, it's an emergent side effect of how deeply the RE Engine's resolution scaler is integrated with the game's rendering pipeline. The engine doesn't distinguish between "the viewport was shrunk because of GameChat" and "the viewport was shrunk because the scene is heavy" — it simply adjusts resolution to meet its performance target.
For Switch 2 owners who prioritize smooth performance over pixel count, this creates an interesting trade-off: you can either play with a full-screen image at lower frame rates, or enable GameChat (even without actually talking to anyone) for a noticeably smoother but slightly smaller game window. Some players on Reddit have already started referring to this as the "GameChat Performance Mode" — an unofficial bonus feature that Nintendo and Capcom probably didn't plan, but one that savvy players are happily exploiting.
As more Switch 2 games hit the market, it will be fascinating to see whether other RE Engine titles — or games using different engines — exhibit similar behavior. For now, RE:9 Requiem on Switch 2 has become a talking point that nobody expected, and it's an excellent reminder that sometimes the most interesting performance optimizations are the ones that engineers never intended.