How hacking your Switch can lead to better Tears of the Kingdom frame rates
Modern Vintage Gamer shows the frame rate improvements possible by overclocking Tears of the Kingdom with a hacked Switch.
For a marquee game on 6-year-old hardware (which was already relatively underpowered when it launched in 2017), the open-world construction set of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a pretty impressive technical feat. Digital Foundry recently laid out how the game's day-one patch ensures the software "holds very close to the 30 frames per second target" for "nearly the entirety" of their playtime.
Still, Digital Foundry does note that Tears of the Kingdom's frame rate can still drop down to 20 fps at times, especially when Link's signature Ultra Hand ability is activated in crowded areas like Kakariko Village or Goron City. For those situations, though, Switch users with a hacked console can use overclocking tools to make the game run more smoothly.
In a recent video, Modern Vintage Gamer (MVG) walks viewers through the overclocking options offered to Tears of the Kingdom players who have installed a tool like sys-clk on their hacked systems. Pushing the CPU up from around 1 GHz to 1.5 GHz leads to "really not much difference at all" in MVG's testing. By contrast, increasing the GPU speed from 768 MHz to just 900 MHz (in docked mode) results in frame rates that are "definitely smoothed out," though there are "still... times where it does drop its frame rate."