Resident Switch nerd and modder here to answer all your questions about OC on the Switch, and any other modding questions
DISCLAIMER: Modding your devices can cause unintended damage, I do not suggest making any changes to your Switch unless you are well educated on the topic.
That's interesting. Are there games that use a lower GPU speed that can be improved by forcing a higher GPU speed?
The thread you link seems to give a scattering of opinions but not many impressions of actually testing it out on games.
Yes, the Switch drops down clock speeds while in handheld mode to help with battery life and heat. It does help the performance of games, but isn't really the main reason for it. Having the sysmodule allows for people to change the clock as needed for what they're doing, and can be programmed straight into the homebrew app to utilize that module.
Say for RetroArch, or the Source engine port.
Would be curious to see how practical this is, as far as actual benefits
Practically it's great; there is still the question of how the actual hardware stands up to the OCing though. Right now, how N64 emulation stands on the Switch, OCing is the best method to ensure your performance.
Interesting...so you could basically get docked mode perf without it being in the dock
Yup! Hit the nail on the head; just depends on how the game handles the dock change whether or not you see any huge jump in performance.
well, yes but you'd still need to plug it into the wall. the only difference is you'd be using the switch screen and not being able to use your TV. not really a pro and defeats the purpose.
No, you wouldn't need to plug it into the wall for OC; light OC only really shaves off about 45 minutes to 1 hour of battery life, if that. You can still use docked mode with it OCed. You might just want a fan pointed at the dock though >.>
To clarify, does this allow for higher clocks in docked mode? That would be sweet. Would provide better performance in many games and even lead to better visuals in adaptive rez games. But I fear how the cooling system would cope. I imagine people that are happy with a perpetually docked system would just crack open the cover and install a custom cooling solution, turning the switch into a supercharged switch variant non-portable boxed console.
Yes, it's a sysmodule, and in this case can be referenced while in handheld or docked mode. There's not a ton of people doing any extra cooling right now because it's generally not needed.
The issues people have been running into are more about killing their battery than killing the fan or other components. I think the team that originally started playing with the OC features cranked it up and let it run on for a good amount of time and it bubbled their battery, the pictures were....scary.
I guess when the Switch is docked it will run on a higher frequency, won’t it? This kind defeat the purpose of doing this, unless you can really specify clocks beyond the default values.
Yes, the Switch does kick up the performance in docked mode.
Yes, you can specify the clocks beyond default values; that's what overclocking is. Though the argument has been made that since the Switch is already under clocked, that over clocking causes no issues, which is still out for judgement.
