Ubisoft recently spoke about some interesting work that it had to do to make Assassin's run at 30 FPS on the Nintendo Switch 2 with VRR enabled ahead of the game's launch earlier in December, but now developers who worked on porting Assassin's Creed Shadows to the Switch 2 have provided more details about the method in an interview with FRVR . As the rendering technical architect, Nicolas Lopez, rendering project lead, Sebastian Daigneault, and engine project lead, Bruno Champoux, explain, the Anvil Engine used for Assassin's Creed Shadows basically tricks the Nintendo Switch 2 by presenting the same frame twice in the same present period, effectively doubling the frame rate and allowing VRR to work when it wouldn't ordinarily work at frame rates under 40 Hz.
Ubisoft's frame rate trick has been confirmed to be in use in both Assassin's Creed Shadows and Star Wars Outlaws, both of which double the effective frame rate in order to hit a 30 FPS target, but it has also been integrated into the company's Anvil Engine and confirmed to be coming to future Ubisoft games on the Switch 2. This development work could also lay the groundwork to allow more Anvil Engine games to make it to the Nintendo Switch 2 with similar optimizations before long. In addition to Ubisoft's own Anvil engine, the developers confirmed that Ubisoft is working with Nintendo in order to bring that support for VRR at lower frame rates to other games.