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Intrinsic on 20 December 2016
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bonzobanana said:

 Regarding the locked cpu speed. It's pretty clear they will provide some headroom in cpu requirements for portable mode to allow for an increase in cpu load when docked. Whether that means portable is 720p 30fps and docked is 1080p 30fps, 720p 60fps or even 1080p 60fps. I'm sure you know that a game engine producing 60fps over 30fps does not need 2x the power. The game engine is generating the data constantly and how the frame rate is delivered based on that data is not a huge difference. The ps2 as weak as it was generating 60 frames per second for most games but only output half the interlace lines of one frame and then the alternate scanlines for the next internally generated frame. 720p - 1080p needs a big increase in gpu performance but 30 to 60 fps does not in the same way, yes it still needs a greater performance level but not to the same magnitude. The gpu may even have functionality to create interpolated frames.

 

No, this is wrong. I will try and explain this in the most generalized basic way possible.

A game engine is split into CPU and GPU tasks. Lets call the X and Y respectively. Now lets take Zelda. To run zelda at 720p/30fps in tablet mode, X and Y must complete all relevant tasks in 33ms per frame. 

You need to increase the power of the CPU by at least 30-50% if you plan on doing the core CPU tasks that are tied to the framerate of a game in half the time. You need to literally double the GPU power to do the same tasks in half the time at the same resolution. 

So basically, if the were to try taking zelda from a 720p/30fps game to a 720p/60fps game they will need at least 40% more CPU and two times the GPU.

Going from 720p/30fps to 1080p/30fps does not require anything on the CPU side. Its purely a GPU bump and as such is signicatly less taxing than upping the framerate. 

Look at it this way, if you take the switch spec undocked, then take it docked with the clock bump to the GPU.... thats exactly what you need to do to render almost twice as many more  pixels than 720p to get it up to 1080p.