There are zero sharpening artifacts in the switch screen.
There's clear ringing in the Switch image. All the bright lights have dark black halos around them, so it's obviously sharpened.
TAA plus sharpening clearly offers better image quality despite the presence of sharpening artifacts and rendering at a lower resolution though.
On PC, rendering at significantly higher resolutions; e.g. native 4K, or downsampling from even higher than that, was still not enough to take care of the aliasing in this game. So it's not that they "botched the PS4 version" as some people here are saying.
It required a mod that replaced the game's SMAA T2x anti-aliasing with a superior TAA implementation:
If only there was a generic way to inject TAA into older games, rather than requiring a custom solution like this. Not that I'm likely to return to it, but
Metal Gear Solid V is a game which stood out to me for its awful aliasing even when downsampling from 4K native on a 1080p display.
I'd still recommend that anyone play
Alien: Isolation on PC if you can (though it's not perfect - the mouse implementation is bad) but this Switch conversion looks great.
I'm usually not one for horror games, but this is one of my favorite games this generation.
I remember at the time that a lot of people were complaining about how soft the anti-aliasing was on PC.
I don't remember people complaining about softness, but that the SMAA T2x anti-aliasing was completely ineffective, and mostly added ghosting in motion rather than improving the image.
I remember dropping this on PC cause the flickery edges drove me crazy and I couldn't figure out how to fix it. Am I to understand the image on Switch is even cleaner than PC?
Cleaner than PC in its default state.
Playing on PC with the
Alias: Isolation mod should provide a similar anti-aliasing implementation, but you have the option to render at higher resolutions and run the game at higher frame rates (it runs really well on PC - not demanding at all).