Shaving Seconds Off The Clock
Nintendo recently added a Labo VR update to the Switch. It looks like they also implemented some fixes to ensure that games load faster than before. In particular, Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey run better than ever now. Whole seconds are being saved!
To be more specific, testing has revealed that several seconds have been shaved off of games like Breath of The Wild. Loading saves is ten seconds faster, fast travel is eight seconds faster, and entering shrines takes three seconds less. This might not seem like a huge deal, but shrines and fast travel account for a lot of your gameplay in BoTW. Anything that makes these activities faster is a welcome change.
Nintendo has achieved this feat by overclocking the Switch’s processor. Or rather, the console has the ability to overclock itself for short periods of time, in order to get things running just a little bit faster. The Switch’s guts will go from 1GHZ to 1.75GHZ in short bursts, which is a huge boost. Nintendo wasn’t especially upfront about this of course (they’re not fond of specifics it seems), but the modding/hacking scene was quick to measure just how much the hardware had improved. Perhaps this means certain crazy slow games will run a little better now?