Modern Vintage Gamer shows the frame rate improvement possible through overclocking Tears of the kingdom with a hacked Switch.
An open world building kit for a marquee game on a 6 year old hardware (already relatively underpowered when it launched in 2017) The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is quite an impressive technical achievement. Digital casting recently installed how the game’s day one patch ensures that the software “holds very close to the target 30 frames per second” for “nearly full” gameplay time.
However, Digital Foundry notes that Tears of the kingdomThe framerate can still drop to 20fps at times, especially when Link’s signature Ultra Handheld ability is activated in crowded areas like Kakariko Village or Goron City. For these situations, Switch users with a jailbroken console can use overclocking tools to make the game run more smoothly.
In latest videoModern Vintage Gamer (MVG) introduces viewers to the overclocking options on offer Tears of the kingdom players who have installed A tool like sys-clk in their hacked systems. Upgrading the CPU from about 1 GHz to 1.5 GHz makes “not really much of a difference” in MVG’s tests. In contrast, increasing the GPU speed from 768 MHz to just 900 MHz (in docked mode) “definitely smooths out” the framerates, although there are “still times when it drops the framerate”.
The biggest performance improvement comes from overclocking the system memory clock from 1.6 GHz to above 1.8 GHz. This increase removes what MVG says is “probably the biggest bottleneck of anything on the hardware right now,” which is that “no matter what I do here, I can’t get the framerate below 30 fps.” This improvement continues even when the CPU and GPU are kept at their original clock speeds.
Digital Foundry’s overview details some special situations Tears of the kingdomthe frame rate can drop to 20 frames per second.
As always with overclocking, this kind of performance improvement is not without risk. Overclocked components generate more heat, which can cause component damage/failure or system shutdown, especially if the ambient temperature is very high where you play. Even overclocking short of bricking your system can lead to increased fan and/or battery usage, which means higher power consumption and shorter gaming times away from the outlet. All of these risks are particularly pronounced for the pushback memory overload described here once called Digital Foundry “The hard limit of Tegra X1” that powers the Switch.
For players who can’t stand the thought of a framerate drop while traversing Hyrule, the risk may be worth it. And for those who want to reduce that risk with some dangerous accessories, you can always invest. suspicious foreign fan for the system dock.
List image by Nintendo