Mere days away from the Nintendo Switch’s launch, elements of uncertainty still surround the final technical specifications for the new console – but a massive leak of Nintendo’s developer documentation, along with a teardown of retail hardware by a Chinese parts firm may well have given the game away. Meanwhile, new information we’ve sourced reveals final tweaks Nintendo has made to hardware performance in the run-up to the console’s release.
The key addition is a new mode seemingly designed to beef up handheld performance. Developers can opt for a 384MHz GPU clock – a straight 25 per cent uplift in compute power compared to the default 307.2MHz option. Both frequencies are available to developers in what it calls ‘normal mode’ operation – and to be clear, users will not be able to choose between them. Additionally, adjustments have been made to available memory bandwidth. In our prior story, we revealed that in undocked mode, developers could choose between running the LPDDR4 memory at either 1600MHz or 1331.2MHz. The 1600MHz option is now only available in ‘boost mode’ – when Switch is docked – while 1600MHz support in mobile mode is deprecated. As before, developers can opt to run handheld modes while in the dock too, and to be clear, the documentation has no new modes for docked performance. On top of that, we should stress that not all games will use the 384MHz GPU mobile mode – game-makers will choose the best fit for their projects, and 307.2MHz remains the default option.
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