Digital Foundry: Nintendo Switch CPU and GPU clock speeds revealed

[potato_hamster]

Goodnightmoon said:

potato_hamster said:

Because console games are heavily optimized specifically for the hardware they're ran on. Games will run worse on the switch if game engines have to be designed to constantly have to check the operating mode of the device rather than just use hardcoded values. It's the same reason PS4 games run and look better on the PS4 than games on similarly spec'd PCs.

They can optimize it for both modes, find the way to optimize it the best possible way while docked and then try to downgrade different parts until it works fine undocked then set that configuration to be used automatically when the game is undocked.

Optimizing it for both modes isn't nearly as effective as optiizing it for one, and it's still a considerable amount of work vs the amount for work to optimize for say, a PS4 or Xbox One. Notice how many PS4 pro game modes are minimal improvements if developers decide to do them at all? That's because it's a lot of work to really take advantage of that extra hardware. Now with the Switch, that would either be mandtory - or the more likely option - developers will just develop for the undocked mode and not really bother with optimizing for the docked mode because that's extra work that isn't required.

What that effectively means is that most third party games will essentially be running on hardware that may be weaker than the Wii U.