People Should Relax About the Switch 2 Display and 'Ghosting' Issues

My aging, stick drift-wracked original Switch was stacked with a library of games I honestly forgot I owned. The Switch 2, with its bigger, brighter display, has breathed new life into this backlog, and it has become my new excuse to revisit Hades and Kentucky Route Zero. A new batch of naysayers claim the screen isn’t worth playing your older 2D titles on due to reported ghosting issues, but the specs are much more complicated than any not-a-tweet post on X may imply.

The Switch 2’s 7.9-inch display is a far better viewing experience than the original Switch, but it may be worse in one aspect: ghosting. In its review of the Switch 2 published over the weekend, Digital Foundry shared some of its insights into a few odd aspects of the handheld’s display. Heavy ghosting is normally a result of lower-quality or older displays that create artifacts when objects are moving quickly across the screen. The display can’t clear each frame quickly enough, and this can add an effect like a momentary blur to characters or objects. While this is a problem with every flat panel display, Digital Foundry reviewers said their experience with ghosting was worse than with a Switch OLED or even compared to the original Switch.

Whether you can notice ghosting may depend on what game you play—especially with 2D side-scrollers—but some users online have already taken these notes about ghosting to claim Nintendo opted for a cheaper or worse display on the Switch 2. Whether you, dear reader, will notice these issues or not is whether you are sensitive to image blurring or if you want to stare at the screen with such intensity you could burn a hole through the handheld.

You can see the ghosting effect best in a video posted by YouTuber Bob Wulff that showcases footage played at 240 fps. Slowed down, you can see the ghosting effect much easier than you can if you were staring at your screen. While it’s indicative of an LCD display that’s cheaper, it’s not the kind of effect most people with untrained eyes would be able to spot. It’s not something you can see in other video reviews that mention ghosting, like YouTuber Taki Udon’s recent review of Nintendo’s handheld.

Since everyone’s bringing up the Switch 2 ghosting again, here is an even slower-mo breakdown.

Even at 240fps you see dramatic ghosting between frames. The image freezes for JUST enough time for you to get a still image, before going right back to ghosting. https://t.co/3zJFQpTOy6 pic.twitter.com/LnLdZ6VMHJ

— Bob Wulff (@BobWulff) June 22, 2025

Now the big question: does this matter? For most users, not really. The Switch 2 still outputs video in handheld mode at 1080p resolution and up to 120Hz refresh rate with VRR, or variable refresh rate. That means the picture is a higher resolution than the original Switch’s 720p and the Steam Deck’s native 800p, and with the higher refresh rate it can show off every frame of a game that pushes frame rates to its limit while in handheld mode. Currently, only Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour showcases any 120 fps content for the handheld, and we may need to wait until we get Metroid Prime 4: Beyond to see whether it can truly make use of those higher refresh rates.

In Gizmodo’s own review for the Switch 2, we didn’t find any overt challenges playing games on the handheld’s screen. Launch games like Mario Kart World and Cyberpunk 2077 (the latter defaults to motion blur turned on, which would obscure any hints of ghosting) seemed vibrant on the new display. Like everybody who enjoyed the Switch OLED, we were disappointed we missed out on the “organic light-emitting diode” display for better contrast and the deepest “blackest” blacks. The Switch 2’s IPS LCD display is brighter than the original Switch. However, hardware aficionados had already complained that Nintendo’s latest console doesn’t technically meet the minimum brightness to achieve HDR, or “high dynamic range.” This allows a screen to create greater variance between the darkest and lightest parts of the screen.

The end result is the $450 handheld console looks fine, though it may not meet the bar set by the most hardware-hungry digital sleuths. What’s worse is the people online who try to characterize Digital Foundry’s findings as a black mark against the Mario maker, despite the site’s largely positive take on Nintendo’s new console, especially in terms of performance when the handheld is docked and connected to a TV.

We wouldn’t be surprised if Nintendo waits several years before offering a premium Switch 2 upgrade to add an OLED screen, like it did with the original Switch. Already, the console has sold so well—with a claimed 3.5 million units sold in the first four days—that Nintendo will probably take a while to push any new hardware. OLED has fewer issues with ghosting than LCD, but the problem persists no matter which panel you use, just to greater or lesser degrees.