Sometimes, the lure of a technological puzzle is impossible to ignore. We've already expressed our love and admiration for the Switch remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, but equally, it's fair to say that its performance hiccups and stuttering are somewhat baffling. In a world where Switch can run id Tech 6 ports reasonably well, and virtually lock Super Mario Odyssey to 60fps, why does Link's Awakening have any issues at all? With a spare day in the schedule, I wanted to get some answers.
While most of Link's Awakening runs fairly well, this is a Nintendo game aiming for 60 frames per second - a target that the platform holder's games tend to hit with unerring consistency. Link's Awakening, however, seems to lurch between 60fps and 30fps (or more accurately, between 16.7ms and 33.3ms frame-times) in the strangest of places. Our solution to this problem: speed and power - specifically, much more of it. Link's Awakening runs at the standard Switch clocks of 1020MHz CPU and 768MHz GPU when docked, with the graphics core dropping to 384MHz in portable configuration. In all modes, an exploited Switch can be manually overclocked to push video processing to 921MHz with the ARM Cortex A57s maxing at 1785MHz.
The overworld presents the lion's share of the performance issues - just leaving the initial hut causes a sudden drop in frame-rate, for little discernible reason. Basic traversal causes minor stutter as we move around the initial beach locale, and more serious drops when transitioning between more significant areas of the map - like entering or exiting the Mysterious Forest, for example. What's curious here is that the stutter is fleeting - within a couple of seconds, we're back to 60fps.
from Eurogamer.net
No comments:
Post a Comment