Nintendo’s Switch is a portable lemon

Slows when using batteries

Nintendo’s Switch is starting to look like a lemon in that you have to connect it to a dock to get an performance.

According to a finding from Eurogamer the console’s clock speed drops to 40 per cent (307.2 MHz) when the console goes mobile. While this only affects the GPU performance and the CPU and memory run as normal, it is a games console so slow graphics is a bit of a killer.

Eurogamer claims that even when the console is docked, it only reaches 768 MHz with the Tegra X1, a chip that usually has a peak GPU speed of 1 GHz.

It is possible that developers can reduce the Switch’s performance when it’s docked, which would make the performance consistent between the Switch’s two modes.

There are all sorts of weird hobbling in this console The Tegra X1 is a fully-featured HDMI 2.0 capable processor and yet the video output hobbled to HDMI 1.4 specs.

It has a 4K output but at 30Hz output you might as well not bother. The X1 also has 16 ROPs but the pixel fill-rate mysteriously running at only 90 per cent capacity. The 14.4 pixels/cycle should be 16 were this a standard Tegra X1.

It is starting to look like the whole thing is a bit of a lemon and probably worth avoiding.