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bonzobanana on 26 April 2018
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curl-6 said:

bonzobanana said: 

I thought their was at least some elements to the wii u that can beat the Switch in portable mode. The higher memory bandwidth of the 32MB of edram, higher gflops of the gpu and the simple fact the Switch relies on heavier compression due to lack of storage plus needs to consider battery runtime which often motivates the developer to run at lower performance levels. The Switch portable version of this game is running sub 720P despite the portable screen being 720p. So no it certainly isn't a fact that the Switch in portable should outperform the wii u especially for a mainly 2D platformer like this.

Switch in portable mode is more capable than Wii U, we have seen this demonstrated in pretty much every other conversion between the two from Zelda to FAST RMX to Bayonetta 1/2, all games which are more demanding than Tropical Freeze. Switch has two performance profiles when portable though, 307MHz or 384MHz, and the developer has the choice to use the lower powered one if they prefer. In this case, they likely figured nobody would notice a slight res drop and so prioritized maximum battery life.

I think there is a option to reduce memory speed as well to conserve battery life and there is always the pressure on storage for a portable system. Rayman Legends was worse on Switch too due to greater file compression and keeping the games storage requirements low meant loading/decompressing was slower and onscreen artifacts due to compression effects, it was impressively small though.

Prioritising battery life is as stated a reason for performance to go lower.  The extra memory and greater CPU performance of Switch isn't really required here. Having to allow good battery runtime and minimise storage space are technical reasons why a wii u may exceed the performance of Switch in portable mode sometimes surely. All that really matters is the end result. The reason the PS3 often had better soundtracks than 360 and longer and/or higher quality fmv sequences on some games was mainly down to greater storage of a bluray disc nothing more. It still enhanced those games despite having little to do with the main chipset performance of those consoles. The wii u had cheap storage with a single layer bluray disc providing 25GB of capacity and no difference in cost to manufacture a 500MB game on its optical disc or a 25GB game because the disc has a fixed capacity that you can use up to. I don't think you can just cancel out battery runtime and limited storage when it comes to Switch games and expect to be seen as fair. 

Saying that its difficult to get too worked up about either wii u or Switch as it looks so amazing emulated. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGdA686roRo

You can also run the emulator with 3D patches for Zelda for example to give VR reality or support for 3D tv's. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNREdbwizks

So its horrible to say it but often the Nintendo gaming experience can be better on non-Nintendo hardware anyway. It's why for me these Switch ports of wii u games without new content are not very interesting as a wii u owner who already owns these games and it still seems nothing really has been achieved of any significance porting the game from wii u to Switch except to play an old game at the same performance level overall. A little less resolution in portable mode, a little more docked.