I watched the GameSpot footage closely on my PC monitor today, in 1080p and full screen, and the image on the Switch screen looked a lot blurrier than I'm used to when it's native 720p... Yes compressed video and off-screen footage caveats and all. But if I was a betting man I would say it's running below native a lot of the time from what I can see. Have you watched it on a larger screen (not your phone)?
But even if this preview demo was dipping below 720p often, it could still improve before release. But the more I see, hear and read about this port and this developer, the less confident/optimistic I become about the final outcome.
Yeah I've watched most of them on PC and they look exactly like I remember on my PC. I can't notice much blurriness at all outside of the seemingly increased motion blur and DoF effects which help mask the lower texture resolution. I'm certainly not the best judge of resolution but all I can say is it look consistently great to me.
I'm only speculating, but when doing port work there are costs involved as well as man hours. A proposal is made at X spec with performance targets. Working with more than one spec can increase the number of man hours required to get there and if some company doesn't want to pay, then they may settle for a baseline and be done with it.
I can't speak for everyone else, but just my experience in trying to secure port work. We don't know what their contracts are like and what they've negotiated with Bethesda. Maybe they're cheap and the reason they're cheap is because of this. Again, just speculation as to why both of the games they're working on only target handheld spec and not docked. Don't see this with other companies, so there must be something about how they do things as to why it's that way.
It could also very easily be that this port (and maybe Rocket League too) was greenlit with very short notice and they only had time to optimize for a single target spec. I wouldn't blame the developer without knowing the other circumstances behind the port.
Also the article mentions that Panic Button is working with id, so I think Bethesda is taking this quite seriously.
But I do agree with you that I'd sooner believe there is some issue with the developer optimizing for docked mode than them actually using the docked mode clocks to their maximum capacity. There just aren't any other games that do this outside of Minecraft, and that has already been fixed.
Based on other ports taking advantages of the docked mode, using the power to increase the resolution for example, for these two games it seems this is not the case. So we will see why when these games will be released.
Actually, now that you mention it, I wonder if they might use more AA in docked mode rather than bump up the resolution. I don't know why they would do that when no one else does, but I guess we really have no clue yet.
