We mentioned in our review that the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild definitely runs better in handheld mode than in TV mode. It’s not terrible, but it definitely drops quite considerably whilst running in the dock when it’s almost perfect on TV mode.
Digital Foundry who manage to analyse the technical aspects of games better than anyone else have done the testing and found out exactly why it appears to be the case.
It appears that due to the fact that the the tablet is only 6.2 inches big. Nintendo has withheld some texture filtering in portable mode, which allows it to run better. It’s also due to the fact that the game is only outputting at a resolution of 720p on the tablet. It’s definitely worth mentioning that the game looks absolutely stunning on that little display.
Because Nintendo know that people will be playing on large screens when docked in TV mode, there’s more graphical enhancements needed in order to ensure that the game still looks great.
We now know that it’s not due to GPU related issues, which was kind of a worry after coming across the issue.
