I really wish Nintendo would give us an overclock button for the Switch. It won’t happen, but I wish it would.
“overclock button OP what do you mean”
The Nintendo Switch’s SOC is basically a carbon copy of the NVidia Tegra TX1 chipset, which was introduced in 2015. It was weak for its time, for sure, but it had powerful graphics hardware that just literally wasn’t possible for most android consoles. Where the Switch differs is that it takes all of that hardware power, slows it way down in the name of battery life, and basically called it a day.
This, of course, has advantages: properly optimized, you can still get a killer gameplay experience with this kind of power, and you’re saving battery life in the process. Properly optimized, you can stretch this hardware far beyond what it can normally do, and deliver an amazing virtual experience while still keeping a spectacular margin.
But there are serious drawbacks.
Sifu, MH: Rise, and SMT 5 are all games that I adore. I have played these extensively, and even completed Sifu on the Switch. But the performance on these games is solidly not awesome. Sifu regularly stutters when loading in a new area, or when getting into a particularly loaded fight. MH Rise barely keeps at 30 FPS and regularly has to lock at 24 to stay stable. SMT 5 barely runs at all in handheld mode, especially when wandering around and dashing. There is pop-in EVERYWHERE. Now, none of these are dealbreakers, far from it, but they are problems, and the most infuriating problem with them is that they are SOLVABLE PROBLEMS!
Nintendo has this long and storied history of just being a colossal dick to 3rd party publishers. That these games run at all is really impressive, because it’s done essentially without ANY help from Nintendo to optimize it. The Switch’s big selling point was “now pretty much anyone can release a game to our store! But good luck getting it to run as good as us!”
Some developers took this as a challenge.
When Sifu runs, it runs FANTASTIC. It flows so smoothly into every attack and every parry, it feels AWESOME. There is SO MUCH HAPPENING in Monster Hunter, and it looks gorgeous while doing it. They are as optimized as they can possibly get without Nintendo’s help. And that’s kinda sad. Imagine what these games could be if they weren’t so constrained by the anemic hardware.
Except… it isn’t anemic hardware.
Remember, the SOC in the switch is underclocked to save battery. But what if we just turned that off? What if the Switch ran at its full potential? It wouldn’t make sense 100% of the time, sure, but what if it was just a toggle? Full power and power saver modes, like on Android?
The frighteningly determined Switch fanbase has demonstrated that if you remove all of the constraints, if you crank everything as high as it’ll go on the Switch, which isn’t even overclocking, but just letting it run how it’s supposed to, you can get some spectacular results. 60 FPS in Breath of the Wild?? Laggy games suddenly running smooth as butter??
I paid 350 for my Switch, I should be allowed to use everything it has on tap. It won’t happen. Nintendo won’t even consider letting it happen. But damn it would be cool if I could just let it run wild, and see how much power we can get out of it.
