The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom's portable performance tested

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has become a massive hit, with social media timelines galore filled with clever Hyrulean innoventions and Korok-based violence in equal measure. We’ve already covered the game with our Tears of the Kingdom tech review just before launch, but we did leave some unfinished business.

Now, it’s time to complete our analysis with a look at performance – including pre-patch frame-rates, how different Switch revisions play the game, what Switch overclocking can bring to the mix, portable play versus docked and how the very latest patch 1.1.1. changes things.

First up, let’s look at the game without the day one patch installed. I picked up a physical copy of the game on release for this very purpose, and as early preview footage showed, performance can drop from 30fps to 20fps in an early town centre when using the ultrahand feature.

There are also subtle performance differences depending on Switch model you’re using. The original 2017 Switch, for instance, sometimes drops frames momentarily where the newer Switch OLED with its upgraded Mariko processor does not. Given that clock speeds are the same, this seems to be a function of memory latency being improved on the newer revision.