Laura Kate Dale: Nintendo Switch Dock Increases Performance, Not Via Extra Hardware

[JEMC]

Barkley said:

JEMC said:
Like Yuri, I'm skeptical about the claim that the dock will allow the games to be run at 1080p. 1080p has more than twice the pixels of 720p, way to much for a simple increase in the speed of the Switch processor.

It's not so much a power issue as a display issue. No matter how demanding the game the Handheld can only ever display at 720p (the display resolution of the screen). So it doesn't matter if the dock literally does nothing in terms of power, it still makes running the games at 1080p possible.

Like you I don't think the power difference when docked will be significant enough to make a game that barely runs at 720p on handheld suddenly run at 1080p fine when docked. The difference in resolution will mostly be simply because the Switch's own screen is only 720p.

The rumored hardware specs make that very unlikely... at least for non Nintendo games.

Miyamotoo said:

JEMC said:
Like Yuri, I'm skeptical about the claim that the dock will allow the games to be run at 1080p. 1080p has more than twice the pixels of 720p, way to much for a simple increase in the speed of the Switch processor.

It makes more sense that the game is upscaled to FullHD and the increased power that the dock could bring is used to add some extra effects and/or better AA to improve the image quality on the TV.

In any case, we'll know for sure in about a month (I hope!).

Actually most sense makes that games running at 1080p but they are downscaled to 720p just in tablet mode.

That doesn't make sense at all.

Running at 1080p is more demanding than doing it at 720p, and uses more power. For a portable device it makes a lot more sense to run at the native resolution of the display to improve battery life.