A new report out of Digital Foundry claims that the Nintendo Switch will only run at 40% of its GPU power when it’s in portable mode. 40% is about the power you would need to run 720p games compared to 1080p. So if the screen is 720p on the Nintendo Switch, then that makes sense.
Nintendo Switch gets heavily underpowered when portable
It’s down to how many cores the maxwell GPU in the switch has. Clock speed alone doesn’t give us enough to judge it by. Maxwell isn’t any worse than the AMD architecture used in Xbox One or PS4. Those consoles just probably have a lot more cores and higher clock speeds. You can just look at Nvidia’s maxwell based PC graphics cards like GTX 970 and 980 in comparison to their AMD counterparts. That said, architecture isn’t an issue, it’s how much of it will you get and how hard will Nintendo allow it to run.
If it doesn’t have any more cores than the x1 chip in shield console we’re disappointed that it doesn’t run at 1ghz when docked. If it has more GPU cores than the shield tablet, then that might equal it out or maybe make it superior in power to shield. Consumer grade Pascal cards came out not too long ago. And Nintendo has been working on the Switch probably before the Pascal chipset release.
What people fail to understand is that this is portable. Meaning, people who buy the thing are going to expect fun small games. If it’s cheap, people will but it like the Wii. Now the only gimmick is that is an economic platform that everyone has because it’s dirt cheap.