The Nintendo Switch’s most significant plus point is its ability to take high quality current generation console gaming on the go thanks to its displayed portability. Players have the ability and the freedom to start a game like Breath of the Wild on a full HD TV and then take the experience with them on their early morning commute to work. A massive part of the Nintendo Switch’s success or failure will be depending on how smooth that transition from TV to portable really is and the initial leaked specs have some number crunchers worried.
After last week’s non-official speculation that the Switch would be less powerful than the original PS4, the most recent Switch hardware analytics have been focused on CPU and GPU times. The revealed reports suggest that even though the CPU cores run at the exact same speed regardless of the console being docked or undocked, that is not the case for the console’s GPU.
Eurogamer dives into a deeper explanation about how to interpret the GPU specs:
We can confirm that there is no second GPU or additional hardware in the dock itself regardless of the intriguing patents that Nintendo has filed suggesting that there might be. With battery life and power throughput no longer an issue, the docked Switch simply allows the GPU to run much faster. And to put it simply, there is a night and day difference here…. a docked Switch features a GPU with 2.5x the power of the same unit running from battery.
If each and every one of these numbers end up checking out then it would seem as though the portable Switch will be running at quite a handicap as compared to the docked version. This will likely cause problems to third-party developers much more than the gamers, as studios will need to develop two versions of the same game.
One of the sources of this news compared the development process of such titles to producing both a traditional PS4 game and a PS4 Pro version of the same game. Fingers crossed that all this extra work doesn’t scare off the long list of third-party developers who claim to be excited about the upcoming console’s potential.
As for any more news regarding the details of the consoles, be patient, it’s a small wait till January 12th.
