 Over the weekend it was discovered that Nintendo switches 8.0.0 and commercially 8.0.1 Update for Nintendo switch includes what is tentatively called a boost mode for Nintendo switch Now I was asked about this over the weekend during various Q&As and live stream conversations And to be completely frank. I had not done much research into it it had just been a headline I saw on Twitter and I kind of dismissed it in general as something that isn't that big of a deal I heard it affected load times and games like Super Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild But in hindsight, it's still something that's extremely interesting and actually makes switch act a lot And I mean this sincerely a lot like a PC Now as we scroll down here, this is obviously on gear nuke is where I got this information from they are the furthest back outlet I could find that first reported on it There is this switch from point oh 8.0 update that came out and It was as you see here over here on the discord servers. It says M4 XW says in fact in 8.0 Nintendo added a 1.75 gigahertz CPU clock as a boost mode come to find out It's actually a 1.785 so it's actually a lot closer to 1.8 than it is 1.7 But whatever it's still a significant boost clock to the switch And this is the CPU that we're talking about now the CPU typically runs at 1.02 So basically 1 gigahertz is is the big takeaway is what the CPU usually runs at and this nearly doubles that this mode that they added the switch and this mode applies in docked mode or handheld and The switch itself probably can't handle a consistent 1.75 1.78 Boost clock like that because of heat I talked about this a bit over the weekend when people are asking me about this You know hey can the switch sustain this and run it like this all the time is this to make moral combat run at 60 FPS Is this for that is this for this is this for future games? And reality is the switch isn't gonna run at this all the time Think of this more like the turbo boost that is on a lot of CPUs for those who don't know in the PC world there's this thing called turbo boost and what it is is a temporary overclocking of Your CPU so you have your base clock so your base clock is 3.8 gigahertz right you might have a boost clock of 4.2 that boost clock is a turbo boost and it is just a temporary boost of one Two or maybe all of your cores for a short period of time during highly intensive Scenes and that seems to be similar to what switch is doing except they're limiting it even more than that And this is for good reason because a lot of games could take advantage of the 1.7 85 Boost it in general for the entirety of the game like you know We chronicles to could use it to run at higher resolution and better frame rates, right? So you know heck Yoshi's craft of world that I just dropped a review for today That could use it to hit actual HD resolution not something I talked about in the review Because I don't think it's that relevant to the review But it is something that could benefit that game but again that would require running at that clock speed all the time and To be honest the switch can't do that I have my my CPU overclocked to 4.1 gigahertz. I'm running a rise in 2700 X on the base Cooler the cooler it comes with and to be honest it can't always stay at 4.1 and it thermal throttles and cuts itself back to protect itself and The same thing happens on switch So what they have done what we have seen Nintendo's doing something quite clever here is they are using this boost clock to improve load times so According to brawl 345 Breath of the wilds load times go like this The old load time for loading from a save file was 31 seconds. It is now down to 21 seconds Fast travel in the game which usually took 19 seconds to load is now down to 11 seconds And the one that you might not notice as easily are entering shrines I assume this means for exiting shrines as well. Usually it takes 10 seconds now It's down to 7 seconds, which is a 30% improvement in that area So it just stays boosted at that during the load sequences and then once you're loaded it down clocks back to 1 gigahertz This is a very smart use of The boost clock so basically what they're saying is look we could run this thing hotter It's just not safe to run it hotter all the time Maybe the heatsink can't handle it. There's also battery concerns to think about by adding more heat and draining the battery quicker But using it in these temporary loading situations It actually can make for a better gameplay experience as you're wasting less and less time Waiting between load sequences, and this is also true. I've heard in Super Mario Odyssey I tested it myself. Unfortunately, I don't have any older Super Mario Odyssey footage with a bunch of loading tested So it was hard for me to confirm on that front But from my recollection it was a little bit faster in Super Mario Odyssey as well And Nintendo is probably going to apply this boost clock to a lot of games moving forward If not retroactively adding it to prior games just to make loading sequences go faster And this is a big deal It's a bigger deal than I think I initially thought Because it does mean that Nintendo is willing to mess around with things even for temporary boost And you have to start wondering no is this kind of thing gonna happen for cutscenes Is this kind of thing going to be expanded upon because clearly the switch can handle running it for short periods of time? So if it can handle running it, you know between 20 and 30 seconds at a time Is it possible that they could find other ways to implement the use of this boost clock more and more in games moving forward? And are they gonna let third parties play around with this boost clock as well? That is I think the million dollar question here when it comes to this boost clock is will Nintendo allow other people to use it and not just them? And the answer is probably yes because Nintendo has allowed all the other modes in the game all the various boost modes all the different Frequencies from docked and handheld and the various frequencies you can do in each one They have allowed them to do that heck Did you know that if their parties want they can run docked mode frequencies in handheld? There's actually I think one game on the market that actually does do that where it will run the Docked mode specs in handheld and yes the switch can handle those specs in handheld It's just battery concerns right the battery drains much quicker So instead of getting your two and a half to three hours of battery life You might get one hour to one and a half right so that's kind of why Nintendo Kind of encourages people to use the down clocked Mode that's specific for handheld anyways Yeah, this is this is big news. I mean we're talking a Significant load time increase, you know 30% load time increases are nothing to scoff at and I am very impressed that Nintendo decided to do this It also shows that the bottleneck for load times is obviously CPU related people were wondering well You know what about loading from a cartridge into a game What about loading save files? What about this and that you know Is it the speed of the cartridges and the speed of the flash memory that's causing a bottleneck and making this not have faster load times? Reality is it was just the speed of the CPU is down clock to a point It was affecting how quickly files could be processed and loaded so again They're not gonna be able to run the switch like this all the time. That would not be advisable I'm sure based on the given heat sink There's a reason that the switch doesn't even run the Tegra X1 at stock You know in docked mode because there's just too much heat to deal with and that heat affects the battery that heat affects Everything you can get even worse warping and imagine that happened in handheld mode and then having your hands get super hot That just would not be good and that's just a lawsuit waiting to happen So I'm glad that Nintendo found a way to temporarily boost it and have it not necessarily negatively impact the end user experience Instead just making it better and it's gonna be interesting to see how they implement this moving forward I also am wondering if it's possible for a switch pro if a shrunk down die That's more power efficient might be targeting 1.7 85 gigahertz as a base moving forward That's obviously something to consider as well if they do revise a switch and release a new and improved version one day If they're playing around with clock speeds I think would make more sense and obviously being able to run it at 1.7 a 5 means developers can test games out at 1.7 a 5 as well with dev kits which might be beefier and more able to dissipate the heat for testing purposes because obviously Nintendo's not gonna want people to like melt their dev kits because then there's gonna order more dev kits. So Anyways, you guys let me know what you think about this down in the comments below. I know that personally I think it's probably a bigger deal than I let on Today, it's only gonna affect load times in the future. Who knows what this new CPU clock speeds going to affect I want to thank you guys for tuning in. Let me know what you think down in the comments below I am Nathaniel from Nintendo Prime and I will catch all of you guys in the next video But before I go be sure to drop a like on this video because hey, it helps us out It helps you out if you like the video You should be dropping likes subscribe for more content and be sure to enter our Nintendo switch super smash bros ultimate Bundle giveaways at the gleam that I only down in the description because hey, it's free and it's a collector's item So good luck. All right, folks. I'll catch you in the next video