Did you know that the Switch 2's GameChat feature can actually boost frame-rates in a handful of games? That's the surprising conclusion we came to after testing a selection of Capcom games based on the RE Engine for last week's DF Direct, following up on a tip sent by DF supporter Draga who first discovered the issue.

Normally, you'd expect exactly the opposite - Nintendo's own guidance to developers suggests that running GameChat can have a small performance penalty, and that's exactly what we see when testing a game with an unlocked frame-rate like Layers of Fear. Here, one scene runs at around 53fps normally, which drops to around 49fps with GameChat enabled in small mode - around an eight percent penalty.

Trade Layers of Fear for the Pragmata demo though, and something weird happens. One area shows the game running at 53fps normally, but enabling GameChat in a small window boosts frame-rates to an even 60fps!

Other scenes show similar behaviour, with a full GameChat window offering a tiny performance penalty (46fps vs 47fps normally), a medium window improving frame-rates to 58fps, and the small window again pinning the frame-rate to 60fps. It's not just Pragmata either, as Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess follows the exact same trend.

The reason is, as you might have guessed, attributable to how the changing size of the game window is handled. When GameChat is enabled, Pragmata kicks into a lower base resolution, reducing GPU load and allowing the frame-rate to reach its 60fps cap without issue. At docked mode, the small GameChat window sees the game running at ~360p, medium ~432p and normally ~540p.

It's clear that this isn't a particularly useful performance hack, as playing the game in less than full-screen isn't ideal, but it is something you can experiment with if you really want a better lock to 60fps. Perhaps it could be useful for speedrunning - cue the iconic Summoning Salt music.