You’re not alone if you’re experiencing bad performance in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. As with its predecessor, the game has framerate drops and stuttering issues. That’s not really surprising, given how underpowered the Switch is. The big question is whether there’s a fix or not.
Can you fix frame drops and stuttering in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom?
There is one fix for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom performance issues. Version 1.0.0, which is the one included on the cartridge, had noticeably worse problems with framerate and stuttering before being patched. A day zero update brought the game up to version 1.1.0, and it solved many of the issues reviewers were having with the framerate dropping and stuttering.
So, if you bought a physical copy of the game and haven’t updated it yet, do so at your earliest convenience. Afterward, you’ll notice it holds a steady 30fps for the majority of the time. Unfortunately, you will still run into frame drops and the occasional stuttering. Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is taking the Switch to the max in both handheld and TV modes, and there’s just not any overhead left to squeeze more performance out of it.
Hopefully, we’ll get the continually rumored Switch 2 at some point, and it’ll have backward compatibility. Tears of the Kingdom really deserves 60fps.