The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a masterpiece, but like the original title Breath of the Wild, it suffers from some serious performance drops during more intense gameplay moments – the framerate drops from around 30 to the low 20s.
If you’re wondering what a more consistent frame rate would look like in the more intense parts of Tears of the Kingdom, there are already a number of videos online showing gameplay locked at 30fps. it even goes up to 60 fps.
As seen in the video below, game developer and YouTuber MVG has uploaded his own footage demonstrating overclocking Tears of the Kingdom using a modified Nintendo Switch system. It manages to achieve a “locked” 30fps at the end with the memory clock. He lists it as “guilty when it comes to docked performance.”
While MVG doesn’t provide specifics on how to overclock the Switch, it warns anyone looking to do it themselves to be careful:
“If you want to overclock your Nintendo Switch, I’d say no, there are risks, you could damage the Switch, potentially fry it, all kinds of [bad] things can be…”
So there you go – Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom runs at a consistent 30fps (and higher) on actual Switch hardware.
To learn more about the performance of this title, Check out Digital Foundry’s review. John Linneman was quite impressed, but found ways to trigger frame rate drops in Link’s new adventure:
“Nearly every instance of major performance loss has been fixed, resulting in a game that’s very close to the 30fps target. Most of all my shots managed to maintain 30fps for the Switch to run. A game this expansive and new is impressive .But it’s not 100 percent perfect and I found ways to lower the frame rate.
“In most cases, this is a result of using Ultrahand. When you change this in a busy area, the framerate will definitely drop, and at that point it will drop to 20fps – again thanks to the use of double-buffered v-sync. The performance feels old-school to me in some ways. reminiscent of the Zelda game – the slowdown only occurs during busy scenes, when the action heats up the shooter can start to slow down. And like those games, Zelda is smooth in terms of frame rate and there is no significant stuttering or stuttering.”