The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a masterpiece, but like the original Breath of the Wild title, it suffers from some serious performance drops during the heat of gameplay – with frames per second dropping from around 30 to the low 20s.
If you’re wondering what a more consistent framerate would look like in the busier parts of Tears of the Kingdom, there are already a number of videos online showing the game running at 30fps locked and even up to 60fps.
As can be seen in the video below, game developer and YouTuber MVG has uploaded his own footage – demonstrating overclocking Tears of the Kingdom using a modded Nintendo Switch system. It still manages to achieve a “locked” 30fps at the end with the memory clock. He labels it “the culprit when it comes to performance in docked mode.”
While MVG doesn’t go into detail about exactly how to overclock the Switch, it does warn anyone looking to do it themselves to be careful:
“I’ll also give a disclaimer if you want to overclock your Nintendo Switch, there are risks involved, you could potentially damage your Switch, you could potentially fry it, all sorts [bad] things could happen…”
So there you have it – Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom running at a consistent 30fps (and higher than this) on actual Switch hardware.
To learn more about the performance of this title, check out Digital Foundry’s analysis. John Linneman was quite impressed, but found ways to cause the frame rate to drop in Link’s new adventure:
“Nearly every instance of major performance loss has been fixed resulting in a game that sticks very close to the 30fps target. Most of my entire recording managed to maintain a solid 30fps in most cases, which is huge for a Switch running this and the upcoming game is impressive.However, it’s not 100 percent perfect and I found ways to cause the frame rate to drop.
“In most cases this is a result of using the Ultrahand feature. When you turn it on in a busy area, the frames per second will definitely drop, and when it does, it drops to 20fps – again, thanks to the use of dual v-sync buffering. Performance me on it kind of feels like an old-school game—the slowdown only happens in traffic scenes, much like a shooter might start to slow down when the action heats up. And like those games, Zelda is smooth in terms of frame rate, and there’s no significant stuttering or stuttering.”
