Digital Foundry is currently preparing fuller coverage of Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim Anniversary Edition on Nintendo Switch 2, but on the eve of this week's DF Direct podcast, we've gathered initial, poor impressions of the most immediately flagrant issue with the latest Bethesda action-RPG port: input lag.

By using a high-speed camera to film a wireless Switch 2 Pro Controller and the Switch 2 in handheld mode, we have measured roughly 220-240ms difference between the press of a button and corresponding Skyrim action like swinging a weapon or moving through menus. How slow is that? While not an apples-to-apples comparison, we know that the Xbox 360's motion-sensing Kinect camera rig has comparable input latency between captured real-world motion and kinematic translation in Xbox 360's Kinect calibration menus. Not a great comparison point.

For good measure, we tested Skyrim's Switch 1 code on the same Switch 2 hardware and measured 150-170ms of latency - still not a fantastic figure, of course, but we're stunned to see a port that's advertised with Switch 2 optimisations somehow decline in one of the most important aspects of an action-RPG experience.

For its part, Bethesda says it is "investigating reports that some players are experiencing input lag on the Nintendo Switch 2" and recommends disabling "gestures attack" within the settings menu. We'd venture to suggest that all players and not "some" players are experiencing the issue and on a cursory examination, changing settings makes little or no difference.

To its credit, this latest Switch 2 port appears to deliver the full Skyrim Special Edition technology stack, as opposed to the pared-back 2017 port on Switch 1. Side-by-side comparisons of still images reveal welcome upgrades like volumetric lighting, improved textures, redone foliage, further level-of-detail (LOD) draw-out distance, improved SSR, bloom and depth-of-field effects. In docked mode, internal resolution jumps from a count of 1600x900 on Switch 1 up to 2560x1440 on Switch 2 (then followed up a DLSS upscale to 4K).

But in motion, we've already noticed some curious visual blemishes on Switch 2. When looking at water, any turn of the player's camera will see the water's surface pause and shift itself upward for a frame or two before returning to its normal height, which adds a surreal, unintended stuttering effect. And in select regions like the Rift, further-out foliage from the player's perspective has a harsh blue palette that is traded out for its normal colour upon it coming closer to the camera, suggesting a possible bug with LOD asset swapping.

We'll have more on Skyrim Anniversary for Switch 2 in the near future, including more thoughts on the new port's inability to exceed a 30fps cap. In the meantime, while we'd love to see even a 40fps option for a game running on such a dated codebase, we wonder whether it's just too great a lift to get shorter frame-times on the CPU front when moving code from Switch 1 to Switch 2.