Barkley said:
You don't remove a GPU while playing a PC game, you also don't revert your PS4 Pro back to a standard PS4 during gameplay. The Switch can be docked/undocked at any time during gameplay. I don't agree with all Bonzo says, anything related to simply code (such as rendering resolution, shaders, refresh rate, Anti-Aliasing, Reflections) can be edited easily. It doesn't have to run the exact same code for both versions, there can be branches that make changes to graphics rendering. Swapping textures and certain other assets would pose a number of obstacles, but that too is not impossible. But he's right that it having to run in a 150GFlops Handheld mode will affect the docked version of the game to some extent. |
You need to factor in cpu performance is identical between portable and docked, no extra performance there for enhancing games, also cartridge costs and lack of flash memory storage space will push games to be smaller. Lastly you have the memory bandwidth being the same. I'm not saying its not technically possible to enhance games for docked mode I'm saying its extremely unlikely based on the circumstances. You can't alter anything that will effect gameplay between portable and docked modes. I'm pretty confident with this prediction but I guess we will know soon enough. Personally I wouldn't be against docked only games that work best on the big screen but I don't think that's what the Switch is about. If memory bandwidth remains at 25.6GB/s then docked performance surely is going to have a bottleneck unless there is secret sauce in the customised Tegra chip, extra cache put in when they ripped out the 4 small Arm cpu's.
I think the Switch has relatively low resources anyway if it really is 1ghz quad core A57 processors there isn't going to be much overhead for mucking about and doing extra stuff within the same code especially if there is a background operating system working too, perhaps making use of one of the cpu cores either fully or partially.
