How Animal Crossing Improves On Nintendo Switch 2: Loading Time & Performance Analysis

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The Nintendo Switch 2 is finally here featuring full backwards compatibility with almost every game, including Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but what awaits when playing it on this new system?

We won’t bury the lede — there’s some real meaningful improvements found in Animal Crossing: New Horizons on Nintendo Switch 2, despite a lack of dedicated enhancement update or any marketing from Nintendo to suggest so!

Watch our video below for an extended visual look, and keep reading on for an in-depth written version with extended commentary on the tested improvements we discovered.

Loading Times Cut In Half, Approximately

The most noticeable difference that all Animal Crossing: New Horizons players will immediately experience on Nintendo Switch 2 is a significant improvement in loading times across most of the game!

We tested various scenarios on both systems, including initial load of an island, entering various buildings, visiting a detailed Dream Island, travelling to a Nook Miles Island, and saving the game.

Most dramatically, we found that both of the initial loads to get into your island from a cold boot were quite impressively improved. The Nintendo Switch 2 saves 12 seconds when going from the Home Screen to the Title Screen, and knocks off another 11 seconds going from the Title Screen to exiting your home.

Combining everything together, we’re looking at about 23 seconds saved going from your Switch’s home screen to actually playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons. For consistency, we ran all tests with Isabelle’s morning announcements already previously triggered.

The loading time changes are most impressive on those first time loads due to their excessive length to begin with on Nintendo Switch 1, but we do see improvements in other parts of Animal Crossing: New Horizons too.

We found about 3 seconds on average knocked off the load times for entering various facilities such as the Museum, Nook’s Cranny, Resident Services, and Airport. That might not be enough to distinctly feel a difference every time, but they collectively add up to a lot of time saved over months of play when frequently entering and exiting buildings!

On the other hand, we weren’t able to find a notable difference for loading a Nook Miles Ticket island — it was practically identical between Nintendo Switch 1 & 2. However, the random nature of those islands makes consistent testing more difficult, so it could be attributed to that.

Other tests we conducted include visiting a very detailed Dream Island where about 7 seconds were saved, as well as entering and exiting a house on that Dream Island where we found about 4 seconds shaved off in both directions.

Finally, we ended with a test of saving the game after doing all of these tasks, but there was practically no difference at all that we found. Perhaps this will vary depending on your gameplay before saving, but it would also make plenty of sense if saving offered far less room for improvement than loading.

You can find a detailed summary of all our loading time testing on Animal Crossing: New Horizons between Nintendo Switch 1 and Nintendo Switch 2 in the table below, including the raw number of seconds saved alongside the speed increase multiplier:

Testing conducted on digital download copy saved to internal storage on both systems. In most cases, load times were measured between the black/white loading screens and do not include entering/exiting animations or other extended segments.

Huge Framerate Improvements On Busy Islands

After load times, the next major improvement we see in Animal Crossing: New Horizons played on the Nintendo Switch 2 are dramatic upgrades in framerate, speed, and fluidity when playing on heavily decorated islands with densely packed items.

Exactly how meaningful you find this difference will vary greatly depending on what kind of Animal Crossing player you are and how much time you spent intricately decorating your island.

The experience on a ‘standard’ island so to speak, with a fairly mundane terrain layout and a regular sprinkling of furniture items placed throughout, isn’t distinctly different between the original Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2. In other words, if you never felt that Animal Crossing: New Horizons was particularly ‘laggy’ before, you probably won’t notice a difference now.

But if you spent hundreds of hours carefully decorating an elaborate island with many densely placed furniture items, and have memories of experiencing laggy movement when walking or running around them, then you’re in for a treat on Nintendo Switch 2! The difference is night and day.

We weren’t able to conduct precise frame-by-frame analysis of the framerate in time to publish today (coming soon hopefully!), but I’m confident anyone with eyes can immediately spot the difference on these islands packed full with decorations. It’s a true generational leap when playing on such islands, as seen in our video.

Furniture ‘Pop-In’ On Packed Islands Mostly Improved

For those unfamiliar, pop-in generally refers to the effect of actually seeing items load into the game within your view, which is not the intended experience. Ideally, every item on an island should be covertly loaded before it can ever be seen in your camera view, giving the illusion that the entire island is always loaded at all times… even though that’s not true.

There’s absolutely a major improvement in the speed of how quickly items are loaded in on Nintendo Switch 2, which does reduce how noticeable pop-in is when it does occur and greatly improves the experience.

But in certain situations, depending on the camera angle and where items are placed, it’s still possible to see some furniture pop-in within your view when moving around. However, they definitely load in much faster than before and do so while maintaining a vastly improved frame rate, so this is still a massive improvement. And of course, only the most densely packed islands will ever experience this anyway.

In an ideal world though, anything even slightly within the camera view would already be loaded in prior with pop-in never seen. The issue here is likely that there’s still some hard coded limits in the original code for how many items can be loaded at once that were of course planned for the original Nintendo Switch. Purely speculating, I believe it’s highly likely the Nintendo Switch 2 could in fact handle quite a few more objects in view if the limit were increased in an update.

That could potentially come with some framerate dips again, but I’m guessing most players who pack their islands would ultimately prefer to see everything loaded in exchange for those dips. Ultimately, everything is a trade off.

This is similar to how Nintendo could have simply implemented a hard limit on objects placed outside, but instead left us to our own devices knowing the framerate would dip. I think I can speak for everyone that this was a better outcome than having hard limits making these ambitious islands completely impossible to build!

Visual Quality Remains Similar

Finally, we should mention that the overall visual quality isn’t notably changed on Nintendo Switch 2 as Animal Crossing: New Horizons did not receive a proper update intended to enhance visuals — only a very small and basic compatibility update.

The improvements we’re seeing in framerate and loading times are simply ‘automatic’ changes as a result of pure processing power and storage speed increases on Nintendo Switch 2. For a distinct improvement in visual quality with a higher resolution like 1440p or 4K, or possibly an increase to 60 frames per second, we’ll need to see work done by the developers in another future update.

As we previously covered, it’s interesting that Animal Crossing: New Horizons didn’t make the cut for any kind of visual update at launch as the second best selling game. This could potentially point to an upcoming proper Nintendo Switch 2 Edition version of the game or simply an entire new game coming sooner rather than later.

Let us know in the comments below how your Nintendo Switch 2 experience is so far, and what differences you’ve felt on your island, especially if you have a densely decorated one!

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