Re:The journey to Nintendo Switch
by simias on Friday September 23, 2022 @11:33AM
(#32953311)
Do you know if this technique is available for all games or just Nintendo's own? It seems like it would be easy to cause issues if games were allowed to mess with the clocking willy-nilly, so I assumed that it was only done on Zelda because it's a first-party title (and one of the biggest on the console).
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I've used this technique in the past on various shipped Switch games. It's an API that puts the Switch into "CPU Boost Mode".
It overclocks the CPU at the expense of GPU. It's suitable only for loading screens or other areas of the game where you don't need to render at more than single-digit FPS, but can produce a 20-50% improvement in loading time.
Interesting, curious if Factorio is using it then.
I work on the game, and can confirm this technique is used wherever it makes sense!
This article[1] claims Crash Team Racing takes advantage of boost mode, so seemingly it's available to third-party developers.
Perhaps they don't get to mess with the clock "willy nilly" and it's more like an API that enables a higher - but fixed - clock speed?
[1] https://www.shacknews.com/article/112895/crash-team-racing-n...
This is available for any game since 2019, here’s an article talking about it: https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2019-nintendo-switc...