Nintendo Switch's Clock Speeds Down By 40 percent When Not Connected Into Its Base Station

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Nintendo Switch, a hybrid gaming console was unveiled by the company in October 2016 and is scheduled to release worldwide in March 2017. Since its announcement, Switch has been in the highlights for one or the other reason.

The latest report from Digital Foundry claims that the Switch runs 40 percent slower when undocked. This simply means the Switch will not able to able to run any graphic intensive games when undocked. A lot of fans will be disappointed as this is their sole purpose of buying a hybrid console. However, this can be contributed to the battery life factor as the system will require more power when operating at its full potential. So, Nintendo might have actually done it by purpose to save battery life as it is one of the crucial factors in a handheld gaming device.

The CPU and memory controller, however, work at their full potential even when the device is undocked. It's the GPU which is the culprit here and it runs around 40% slower. Talking of the numbers, the Tegra X1 chip used in the Nintendo Switch is capable of doing 1GHz speeds but in Switch, the chip only performs crippled at speeds of 768MHz at best, GEEK reported.

These numbers are no competition to the Xbox One and Sony PlayStation 4 which were considered as the main competitors of Nintendo Switch, Polygon reported.

Slower clock speeds when the device is undocked may provide an unpleasant experience to the players. Lower frame rates, frame rate drop, graphic glitches are some of the results of lower clock speeds of the GPU which might be a bummer to some gamers out there. Apart from lower clock speeds when undocked, Switch also uses an inferior Nvidia Tegra X1 chip rather than the upcoming and more powerful Tegra X2 SoC. 

Hopefully Nintendo will address these issues in the final production unit so that the gamers have a seamless experience every time, whether the device is docked or undocked.