Summary:
Many games see noticeable improvements, but how much of an improvement will vary. Games that are bottlenecked by GPU or memory bandwidth benefit significantly, whereas CPU-bound titles only see small improvements.
Arkham Knight, famously one of the Switch’s worst ports, is now a playable 30fps. Dragon Quest Builders 2 is… playable but still not great, building as much as possible to stress test the hardware can drop to single digit framerates on Switch 1, that’s now around ~20-22fps here. These are the two most demanding titles tested, which means that most everything else came out pretty good.
The obvious caveat here is that games cannot exceed hardcoded targets. Games with uncapped framerates and dynamic resolution will be able to take advantage, but capped framerates and fixed resolutions must remain so.
N3DS downclocks to O3DS speeds on any game not specifically tagged as N3DS-enhanced. Softmodding can enable full clock speeds though.
It’s kind of the point I was trying to make though. They could have unlocked CPU speed for O3DS games by default, and they chose not to. I assume they didn’t because of all the games, there will always be the odd ones that behave unpredictably when they’re running on unintended specs. So they went for 100% compatibility unless the game was specifically patched for N3DS.
Even though this time it’s software emulation, they could have played a bit safer by emulating exactly a Switch 1, including clock speed. Turns out Switch 2 seems to have very good compatibility, with only a couple problematic games they are working on, so in the end, good that they did it that way.
I think it’s because the market changed around them. When the 3DS launched they were one of the only companies providing decent BC. Now, everyone does it and people expect games to actually play better on the new devices.
Still a surprise that Nintendo got the message, but with the dozen first party games that got free patches it was clear this was a new era for them. I’m playing Pokemon Violet right now after beating Scarlet a few years ago and it’s like a whole new game on Switch 2, all the performance issues are just gone.