[Digital Foundry] Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom Performance: Portable Play, Overclocking, Pre-Patch Code!

[John Elden Ring]

In a collaboration video featuring MVG, John Linneman returns to The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to concentrate on a range of performance tests. How well does the game run in portable mode and what's happening with dynamic resolution scaling there? Is there any difference in performance terms between the OG 2017 Switch and the later revisions based on the Mariko processor revision? And to what extend can exploited Switches improve performance via overclocking?

While memory overclock is where you get the big beneficies... basically makes the game flawless 30fps (1.6Ghz to 1.8Ghz) and teorically can reach 60fps in extreme overclock cases.... John says overclock to 2.8Ghz in memory with Makino.

Anyway Portable mode has better performance and dynamic resolutions between 540p and 720p (mostly in 720p).
As the bottleneck is memory bandwidth then makes sense the Portable mode with lower resolution having better performance than Docked mode.

 

[ethomaz]

Ohhhhh the Makino vs old X1 was a question I made to him on twitter after the talk with @Vertigo here:

Legend of Zelda: TotK Live Impressions and Open Spoilers

Oh you mean my performance criticisms? Docked. I never play switch as a handheld. It’s an earlier model. I wonder if the bold is the issue. DF and others reviewers don't use the Switch model with old processor. BTW DF showed in some cases in BotW you have that scenario: Of course they said...

icon-era.com

BTW article:

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

It's time to complete our Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom performance analysis with overclocking, pre-patch frame-rates and…

www.eurogamer.net

And yes it is confirmed the old X1 drops more frames than new Makino.

There are also subtle performance differences depending on which 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.

 

[ethomaz]

APU overclock facs limitations in memory latency so it won't increase the perfomrance.

While memory overclock is where you get the big beneficies... basically makes the game flawless 30fps (1.6Ghz to 1.8Ghz) and teorically can reach 60fps in extreme overclock cases.... John says overclock to 2.8Ghz in memory with Makino.

Anyway Portable mode has better performance and dynamic resolutions between 540p and 720p (mostly in 720p).
As the bottleneck is memory bandwidth then makes sense the Portable mode with lower resolution having better performance than Docked mode.