I played Kingdom Hearts III at 40fps on my Steam Deck because stable 60 was not possible (and even if I could, I rather have more battery life). It was the first time I played a game at that framerate. And it was... Surprisingly smooth. I played the game before at 60fps on PS5 and while it wasn't exactly the same experience it was much better than 30fps for example. Going from 30 to 40 doesn't sound like a huge increase on paper, but 40 felt closer to 60 than to 30 in terms of smoothness.

I'm saying this because I wish more games went for 40 fps when 60 it's not an option. Specially now that the Switch has VRR (on handheld mode at least, which is how I play most of the time).

If they really wanted to, they could always sell a new dock that does that. Although I think they'd rather sell a mid-gen refresh. Nintendo has historically prioritized low energy consumption even in their full home consoles (Wii, Wii U, etc.)

Would also love to see docked mode when plugged into a USB-C power source. Like you essentially can do with PC handhelds.

I don't think another fan in the dock would do much. You'll probably see once the system is hacked and overclocked, it can run max clocks just fine without heating issues.

The issue is the battery in undocked and everything has to scale around that to some degree, so docked probably can perform significantly better than what we see now, it's just that they need to have some level of parity between docked/undocked.

The CPU the system has is actually fairly powerful, if those cores are allowed to clock higher, there's a lot more performance you can squeeze from there for sure.

My guess is once overclocked you will see games that run at 30 fps with some dips become 40-45 FPS in a lot of cases with some drops here and there to 30-35, and games that run at 30-40 can push up to 50-60 fps, and 60 fps go into 80-90 fps range (which is going to be interesting with that VRR screen).

Isnt that basically "Balanced mode" for a lot of the newer games? 

I tried 40 FPS too and it was definitely better than 30.

Going from 60 to 90 (and 120) was pretty eye opening too lol - had that experience earlier this year with FFVII Remake Intergrade on my gaming PC.

Speaking of Kingdom Hearts - man I hope SE plans to release KH collection (1.5+2.5, 2.8 and 3) on Switch 2 - would instantly buy them so I can play them on my Switch 2 portable. 

Hate how the Cloud versions are the only versions available on Switch.

It's not that unusual for games early in a console's life to still have to make concessions in ambitious titles; Odyssey itself for instance used a lot of tricks like lower rate animation on distant characters, dithered transparencies, and an interlaced 640x720 in portable mode to squeeze 60fps out of Switch 1 while looking as good as it did.

I wouldn't call brief drops to 30fps in a few specific instances a "severe" compromise personally. These sections make up maybe 1-2% of the experience.

Yeah DK Bananza runs at 60 fps like 99% of the game, honestly even the image quality looks quite good to me, granted I have a pretty good TV.

The environmental destruction and the scale of it is very impressive, as an aside I think this is one of the best games Nintendo has made in the last 20 years. It's my GOTY so far and I think it's probably better than Odyssey. The main thing I wish is the 2D DKC levels were better integrated into the main game. 

Current fan in dock doesn't cool console itself, only dock. Putting two small fans under the dock, at the positions of console air intakes (like those dock add-ons do) would give much better cooling for main unit.

Yeah but I don't think that's the reason for not max clocking the system. 

The reason is the undocked performance can only hit a certain amount of battery life at a certain clock and the docked mode is kinda hogtied to that as well because the docked performance can't be too much higher than undocked. 

If they put too large of a battery in there it would make the system heavier and larger and I think Nintendo holds themselves to fairly strict standards on thickness of the system and the weight unfortunately. It's not that the chip can't manage more though. Honestly even as is the Switch 2 is a pretty large and heavy device by Nintendo standards, they definitely pushed the envelope there I think, but they're not going to release a fat ass brick like the Steam Deck. 

I don't think it's a cooling issue, you'll probably see when ever the thing is hacked/overclocked that people are able to run it full tilt without much fuss. I think the fans that have as is are adequate to keep the system cool likely even at max clock. 

Watt for watt though, this thing  is a beast, at like 10 watts I don't think there is anything else on the market that can deliver the gaming performance a Switch 2 can. 

There's no reason why docked mode should be limited to only 1.8x (GPU wise) of undocked (as it currently is) - docked mode has nothing to do with battery. GPU in T239 is apparently maxed out at 1.4Ghz, so even going to 1.3GHz from 1GHz would see quite an uplift in docked performance. And yes, I'm fairly certain those fans under the dock could've provided that and boost to CPU as well. But then dock would cost a bit more, power supply bit better, their binning would probably need to be much tighter, which translates to loss of profit...so yeah, no higher clocks.

I wouldn't mind it, but I think Nintendo doesn't want the gap between undocked and docked being too large. 

We'll see when the system is inevitably hacked, but I'm guessing what will show up is that the system can max clock and be cooled by the existing fans just fine, same deal as the Switch 1.