This week sees the release of a little-known game called The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom — you might have heard of it. While we have all been waiting to dive in for what feels like an eternity, we can now, finally, get an idea of how this thing actually runs on the Switch thanks to the tech experts over at Digital Foundry.
In short, they found that the game runs pretty darn well. Digital Foundry has given Tears of the Kingdom an overall positive technical analysis, though it does also point out that there are still some areas for improvement.
Following a patch that promised to fix some frames-per-second issues on the review build of the game, Digital Foundry’s tests found that the game now runs at a solid 30fps for almost all of the playtime. There are certain moments in which the rate drops — the analysis cites the use of the Ultrahand ability in particularly busy areas as one such trigger — but, generally, “Zelda is smooth in terms of frame-pacing and lacks any significant stutter or hitching”.
In terms of resolution, the tests found that the game’s resolution sits at 900p in Docked Mode. This resolution is, however, dynamic, and is capable of dropping to around 720p when the camera is in motion before leaping back up to its original figure when the camera stops. The max resolution appears to be 720p when played in handheld mode, with Digital Foundry noting how nice it looks on a Switch OLED.
The analysis does note that some cutscenes can suffer from “exceptionally poor” video quality during the pre-rendered sequences. Fortunately, those rendered in real-time are much improved with “sufficient” video quality.
Having praised the game’s 5.1 surround sound and new cloud implementation, Digital Foundry notes that the visuals do not quite match up to those that were shown in some of the early trailers and suggests that perhaps some larger hardware could accommodate this in the future. But for now, the tech experts were impressed to see a game of this complexity running on Switch.
The full Digital Foundry report can be found in the video above or read over on Eurogamer. For our thoughts on the game, be sure to check out the Nintendo Life review below:
