OUCH! My eyes!

Have you ever tried playing GTA: The Ballad of Gay Tony on a laptop with 512 megs of video ram? I have, and I'll tell you, it's a rough exeprience. Choppy framerate, low-ass resolution and muddy textures. Your eyes hurt when uneven frametime runs wild. 15 fps to 40 to 10 to 2 to 30 and so on. Why do I mention that? You've already read the title, and BoGT isn't on Switch (unfortunately). Many of Switch games, mostly ports, could feel like that on the console.

OG Switch was basically an Nvidia Shield, but a tablet. Ofc it's more complex than that. Tegra X1 powered console that couldn't hold a candle to the likes of PS4 or Xbone. It was clear that only 1st party games and indies would initally target 1080p@60fps. And even that wasn't always the case. For developers to get PC and then-current-gen console games run on Switch was an impossible task without cutting corners. And corners they did cut. Ironically though, these cut corners turned out to be blessings in disguise in the long run.

Witcher 3 on Switch? More likely than you think

How did the developers squeeze even AAA games into a tablet, that has a hard time running the eShop? Same ways they often used to have to resort to. There are harder, expensive ways, and cheaper, lazy ways:

Harder

• Complete game overhaul, with every tiny platform-specific optimization possible. Think Warframe, where fixes to make it run on Switch were incorporated into the PC version. Taking into account what the platform is good at, and where it lacks. What's the exact texture resolution you can use for the game to still look gorgeus, but not to exceed available bandwith. Hell. Some older games that got ports/remasters on Switch managed to run and look better than on PS4, like Alien.
• Creative micro-optimizations, cleverly hidden from the gamers unreliable eye. Human eyes are easily tricked. Any optical illusion will prove this. That fact is heavily used in videogame creation, and computer graphics as a whole. The whole computer screen is just a bunch of colors making different colors. On Switch it came in different flavors. Did you know in handheld Mario himself in Odyssey is rendered at half the resolution? I wouldn't have noticed if I didn't know. Simple things like using a checkerboard patterns instead of transparency can really go a long mile. Where to use these, and when, now that's the difficult thing here. And coming up with those as well. That's basically how Pokemon SV looks "worse" than any Xenoblade game, even though it uses more modern CG techniques.

Lazier

• Dynamic resolution. 1080p might sound easy enough for a sprite-based 2d indie platformer. For a detailed 3d environment it's a death sentence. With games getting more and more detailed, varied, you can't optimize every single frame. This is where dynamic res comes in. Opening area of the game runs at stable 30 at 1080p? Great. Another area drops to 20? But could keep stable 30 at 720p? There you go, just slap a dynamic resolution, which will help keep the game stable-ish, at the cost of visual clarity. It's great when it's used with other optimizations in-place, but for some titles setting lower bound to 500p and calling it a day is the only "optimization" unfortunately.
• Unlocked framerate. It's kind of a reverse situation to the above, though not exclusively. Let's say your game keeps the same visual clarity but in some places it runs better, in some it struggles. You could just cap the fps at 30 and keep it stable. But you feel sad that sometimes actually the game could go to 45 or 60. So you uncap the framerate. You pay with uneven frametimes, which make my eyes hurt, but in numerous instances the game can run smoother. That is, if OG Switch had VRR, which it doesn't.

Losers being winners

Why the writeup then? Take a guess, games with which optimizations benefit the most from the Switch 2 backwards compatibility. If you guessed the "lazy", then you'd be correct!

Switch 2 is a powerhouse compared to Switch. Though it's way different that a translation-emulation-something-ish layer is in place, as it cannot run OG games 1:1. No more 2 Gamecubes tied together like on Wii. They way it works however leaves up more resources for the old games to use. So, if a game was optimized with knowing exactly how much to allocate, it mostly won't allocate more. If a game was optimized with yolo, then oh boy.

Games with dynamic resolution basically stay at the upper bound. Those that can hit 1080p hit 1080p. Unfortunately some games like Xenoblade 2 have upper bound still so low, that staying there doesn't really help anyway. But For many titles that stayed on the lower bound it's a literal game changer.

Unlocked framerate? More like stable 60 fps baby. Almost any older game that either ran at 45 fps, or struggled between 30 and 60, now runs at 60. Wonderful 101, Resident, it's like day an night.

The developers that chose the "lazy" approach unintentionally have now less work to do if they want their games to use the Switch 2 hardware. If you optimized every single thing for the platform, that was the right call at the time, but now you'd have a whole lof af a game to rework (I'm still hoping for some Xenoblade patches ;_;).

I just find this fact a bit silly. Maybe even reflective of life as a whole. Dang, maybe being lazy is the elusive "???" before "profit"? Or maybe I'm just looking of an excuse not to clean up my flat. Both probably.