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 dips during the hottest gameplay moments – with frame rates dropping from around 30 to 20 seconds.
If you’re wondering what a more consistent frame rate would look like in the busiest parts of Tears of the Kingdom, there are actually a number of videos online showing the game running at a locked 30fps and Even up to 60fps.
As seen in the video below, Game Developer and YouTuber MVG He uploaded his own screenshots – demonstrating overclocking Kingdom Tears with a modified Nintendo Switch. He was able to achieve a “locked” 30fps in the end using a memory clock. He describes this as “the culprit when it comes to performance in docked mode”.
While MVG doesn’t go into detail on exactly how to overclock the Switch, it does warn anyone who wants to do it themselves to be careful:
I’m also going to make 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 of [bad] Things can happen…”
So, here it is – Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom runs at 30fps (and higher) on actual Switch hardware.
To learn more about the performance of this title, Check out Digital Foundry Analysis. John Linneman was very impressed, but found ways to cause frame rate drops in Link’s new adventure:
Nearly every instance of significant performance loss has been corrected, resulting in a game that sticks very closely to the 30fps target. The majority of the entire capture period manages to maintain 30fps in most cases, to run a Switch game this broad and emerging. However, it’s not 100 percent perfect, and I’ve found ways to cause frame rate drops.
In most cases, that’s the result of using the Ultrahand feature. When swapping this out in a crowded area, the frame rate is sure to drop, and when it does, it drops to 20fps — again, thanks to the use of double buffer v-sync. The performance reminds me of an old school game in some ways – the slowdown only occurs in busy scenes, similar to the way a shooter might start to slow down when the action gets intense.As such games, Zelda is smooth in terms of frame speed and lacks any significant stutter or stuttering “.