Why do Switch 2 ports of RE Requiem and FF7 Remake have bad hair?

Leon and Grace’s immaculate hairstyles can look seriously funky at certain moments

You’ve probably heard by now that Leon Kennedy is looking finer than ever in Resident Evil Requiem. But if you’re planning to play the latest installment of Capcom’s survival horror series on Nintendo Switch 2, you’ll need to brace yourself for slightly less-kempt Leon: on Switch 2, he’s got some seriously janky hair.

Most of the time, Resident Evil Requiem heroes Leon and Claire look salon-fresh despite their hellish circumstances, their tresses redolent with natural movement and fine detail. But the Nintendo Switch 2 version can occasionally make their crowning glory look like a deep-fried Amazon wig.

To be clear, several members of the Polygon team have had a rollicking good time with Requiem on Nintendo’s console. But it is amusing to compare these images to all the 4K screenshots making the rounds.

Resident Evil Requiem isn’t the first Switch port to have these kinds of issues. Back in January, in the lead-up to the release of Final Fantasy 7 Remake on Switch 2, Polygon noted that Cloud’s iconic, spiky blonde hair gets all frizzy in handheld mode. “In docked mode, he gets normal hair,” noted Polygon’s Josh Broadwell. “In handheld mode, it's all blurry with indistinct edges, more like blonde static than the impeccable coifs on top of most Final Fantasy protagonist heads.”

While it’s a small quibble with an otherwise impressive port, other reviewers noticed as well. The issue seems to stem from the Switch 2’s use of DLSS, an Nvidia-made AI tech that uses machine learning to upscale lower-resolution images in real time. About a month after the launch of FF7 Remake on Switch 2, Japan-based gaming blog Automaton asked director Naoki Hamaguchi about the rendering issues, and he offered an illuminating response:

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.

In the interview, Hamaguchi notes that the rendering issue “often comes up with other companies’ ports as well,” and that seems to be what’s going on with Leon and Grace in Requiem, too. When the hardware’s AI upscales lower-resolution graphics, the fine details of photorealistic hair get lost. The result? A frizzy, angular mess.

Still, there are good reasons to believe these issues won’t last forever. The Switch 2 is still the new kid on the console block. As time goes on, devs will likely figure out workarounds to prevent wonky hairstyles in future games. FF7 Remake and Resident Evil Requiem might see these visual hiccups erased by a future patch, or Nvidia’s DLSS tech may improve over time, allowing these quibbles to be resolved with a firmware update. Nevertheless, for many players, an occasional bad hair moment isn’t enough to spoil the fun of playing on the go.