I'm not asking this question from a positioning standpoint. I'm simply asking it from an engineering standpoint.
Oh yeah, then the barrier here is active cooling. If you put a cooling solution in the dock, it's going to be super inefficient because it can only cool the backplate, or increase draw at the vents if you're very clever. But you're cooling something which is in contact with something which is contact with something that is in contact with the SOC. You can dissipate heat as fast you want off that plastic backplate, but it's only so conductive
Could this be more feasible if they kept the 720p screen, though? More brute force reserved solely for docked mode could go towards a more balanced native/DLSS ratio, where keeping a 720p screen for handheld keeps the bar low.
I don't think handheld mode to docked mode having a bigger performance delta is a big deal if the target resolutions are going to be differerent. Especially if it sticks with a 720p screen.
We don't have to speculate, we can quantify the ideal performance delta - it's where the performance per pixel is the same. Think about a typical AAA PC game's settings panel - widgets for Reflection Rendering, Anti-Aliasing, Foloage Density, Texture Resolution, Shadow Quality, Ambient Occlusion, Depth of Field, Hair Detail, Particle Effects, Bloom Level, Depth of Field, on and on and on. And these are just examples from a handy game that
originated on consoles.
All of these settings exist independent of resolution and scale in performance cost with it. Meaning, that if you cut the GPU power in half, you can cut the resolution in half
while leaving all these settings unchanged. This not only means that handheld and docked experiences are the same, it cuts the development work considerably.
Can you get away from that ratio? Sure, it's not like there is a bright red line. It's more like a spectrum where the closer you get to the ratio, the simpler everything becomes, and the further away, the bigger the problems
To be clear, I don't think this is a Powerful Dictate From Mr. Nintendo That Can Never Be Broken. EPD is going to be
making games while the hardware is being designed. And both the hardware teams and the software teams are going to be told that both modes have to look good. EPD is going to want more power, all the time. The Hardware Team is going to want less power, to drive down costs. Both sides are going to want the device to be successful. That natural push and pull means that EPD will push for more performance, and if hardware can give it to them reasonably, they'll get it. And Hardware will push for a smaller batter, a quieter fan, a cheaper dock, and if EPD has unused performance lying around, then they're going to have to give it up.
We saw this with the Switch. Nintendo actually started with a perfect 2.25x performance ratio, exactly the same as the target pixel ratio. But they quickly made the ratio smaller, pushing handheld mode further. Why? Because the memory bandwidth on the TX1 was really bad, and it limited what handheld mode could do, so that
handheld and docked mode were too different. Nintendo couldn't fix the "real" problem without tanking battery life, so the extra GPU power was the band-aid.
DLSS may skew these numbers a little bit as EPD figures it out, and because tensor core performance scaling affects DLSS performance in non-obvious ways. I don't think memory bandwidth or CPU speeds will be an issue this time around, but perhaps there is a similar confounding factor that means GPU power needs to be tweaked in one mode or another to compensate. But that 2.25x performance factor is just the natural stable point that, even with no pre-planning, they're going to gravitate towards.