I’ve used switchroot in the past on Android 10. I recently got a new SD card, formatted and partitioned it and installed Android 11. Almost everything is working great, aside from docked mode. When I go into advanced system settings, it shows my TV as 1080p, 60Hz. It’s clearly running at 720p though. I’m running the official Switch dock into a Yamaha RX-V581 home theater receiver into a Sharp Aquos 1080p TV. If I look at signal info in the Yamaha receiver, it says it’s receiving 1080p. If I use the system menu to manually switch the TV resolution to 720p, one of two things happen. Most commonly, I’ll get a black screen. Sometimes, I get a zoomed in view in the upper left corner that looks like it’s trying to display 1080p on a 720p screen. My primary use case for switchroot is to run Steam Link or Parsec to stream games from my PC. When I was running Android 10, I had a similar issue to what I describe above, but I was able to find a workaround. The issue would happen if I launched Steam Link in handheld mode, then docked the console. The app would be “stuck” running in 720p and even disconnecting and reconnecting to my PC would give the same results. If I undocked the console, force closed Steam Link, then re-docked the console, then relaunched Steam Link, it would be in 1080p. This workaround doesn’t seem to work anymore in Android 11. Is there something I’m doing wrong here? Is my home theater receiver or the switch dock being problematic? Should I go back to Android 10? I like the idea of just using the switch for all my portable gaming, using Parsec on the go and Steam Link locally, but it’s starting to seem like I might want to save up for a Steam Deck.
EDIT: After some research I found that this was indeed a problem with Android 11, and rolling back to Android 10 “solved” my problem. Docking / undocking works seamlessly and the docked resolution is truly 1080p. I’m not sure if this counts as solving the problem, but it works for me. I’ll update further if something turns up that allows this to work properly in Android 11.
You know, I never really thought about it as I wasn’t running Android 11 very long, but it was running cooler. It doesn’t run so hot in Android 10 that I’m worried about damage, but it’s noticeably warmer at idle. I tried moonlight back when I had a 1080ti in my gaming rig, but nowadays I’m running a Radeon 6800 xt, so no moonlight for me. I tried AMD link earlier, but as expected it’s not very good. Performance wise, Parsec has been the best so far. However, I have to log in on my desktop and launch big picture mode to really be able to do anything, as it connects to the desktop and trying to do anything with the touch screen is miserable. The main benefit of steam link is that it launches straight into big picture mode, and Steam knows that you are streaming, so when you disconnect it closes it. Both Parsec and Steam Link perform much better in handheld mode than docked mode. I get less than half the latency. With Steam Link running in docked mode with diagnostics enabled, I get the occasional “slow display” message and the decoding latency spikes up, so that kinda confirms my theory that the switch hardware is struggling to decode the 1080p video. I guess for now I’ll be sticking to my usual strategy, which involves a mix of using my physical Steam Link on the TV, Switch in handheld mode when I feel like not being in front of the TV, and just my plain old laptop with a controller or keyboard / mouse connected otherwise. Or, you know, physically playing at my gaming rig.