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DF on Zelda Switch: Docked has major frame drops, portable doesn't (no score talk)

Alienous

Member
Do we think Nintendo is going to address these frame drops? They usually don't really do that right?

They aren't usually in a position where there are frame drops to address.

Considering that there's DLC coming I imagine they will have stability patches.
 

duckroll

Member
I am simply responding to someone asking which 3D Zelda games have subpar framerates and them saying that the OoT and Majora both have 20fps in the same sentence?

?????????????????????

what the fuck? my dude? are you talking about? Jesus christ

BotW is "designed around" a variable framerate. Hence it is perfect. Checkmate.
 
Do we think Nintendo is going to address these frame drops? They usually don't really do that right?

we will see. sometimes they don't give a fuck at all
and sometimes they go completely batshit insane.

just remember when they, in all seriousness, updated/patched the perfectly running Wii VC Starfox 64 rom to actually regain the original slowdown/framerate drops of the original N64 game.

lol
 

oni-link

Member
I have ordered the Wii U version, but I personally found both Far Cry 3 and Dragon's Dogma perfectly playable on PS3, so how does the Wii U version compare to those?

Is Wii U BOTW worse than those games?
 

duckroll

Member
20fps was acceptable back then. Is it hard to go back to now? Sure, but you (well, I) get used to it after some time. Frequent severe drops you never get used to.

Tell that to every big AAA game. GTA3? GTA4? GTAV? RDR? AC? AC2? AC8? And TES game? Fallout? Big open world games which sell really well must have poor framerate. It makes then immersive and appealing. Nintendo researched this well. If you try to have good performance like MGSV, you get fired.
 

Rodin

Member
no way in hell it would ever run at 60fps even at 720p

Considering that bandwidth isn't an issue at 720p and that the gpu docked is 2.5x faster, it's probably closer to reality that "no way in hell it wouldn't run at 60fps in 720p". The only thing that could potentially cause issues is physics, technically the Switch CPU is more than twice as capable as Wii U's in most scenarios, but who knows.

I have ordered the Wii U version, but I personally found both Far Cry 3 and Dragon's Dogma perfectly playable on PS3, so how does the Wii U version compare to those?

Is Wii U BOTW worse than those games?
No lol
 

RoadHazard

Gold Member
Tell that to every big AAA game. GTA3? GTA4? GTAV? RDR? AC? AC2? AC8? And TES game? Fallout? Big open world games which sell really well must have poor framerate. It makes then immersive and appealing. Nintendo researched this well. If you try to have good performance like MGSV, you get fired.

Guess everyone who worked on Horizon will get sacked as well. :(
 

Slaythe

Member
Friendly reminder than 99% of EU games until the late ps2 games had shit framerate because of bad PAL conversions.


It's all about standards.

In 2017, drops from 30 to 20 are not really acceptable. Hopefully they can work out a performance patch.
 

Rodin

Member
He was being sarcastic.

He meant Horizon was a looker, open world, AAA, and had steady FPS.
Switch isn't a 4tflops console, Horizon isn't GG's first game on that kind of hardware, it wasn't ported from a different architecture and it certainly wasn't rushed to be the only system seller at launch.

Edit: nvm, missed the context
 

RoadHazard

Gold Member
Still a shitty post. Switch isn't a 4tflops console, Horizon isn't GG's first game on that kind of hardware and it wasn't rushed to be the only system seller at launch.

Seriously? Please try to be aware of the context of a post (i.e. read what I was replying to) before commenting on it.
 

Laughing Banana

Weeping Pickle
Imo despite what Nintendo might have said, Switch for me sways way more to the handheld side than the console side. I personally think handheld is a much better designation for Switch than a console.
 

Truant

Member
Does the game actually shimmer like that when played? It looks really jarring.

Depending on your TV the image quality will vary from "ugly-as-sin" to "ugly". Shimmering included.

I'm a IQ/FPS whore, but I just had to tell myself not to notice this stuff when playing the game. I actually manage fine with the graphics, but it's hard to ignore the drops to 20 fps.
 

Justinian

Member
I am simply responding to someone asking which 3D Zelda games have subpar framerates and them saying that the OoT and Majora both have 20fps in the same sentence?

?????????????????????

what the fuck? my dude? are you talking about? Jesus christ

My fault since I should have worded it better. By subpar I meant regular frame rate drops of 10 frames per second when you only have 30 to work with in the first place. Ocarina/Majora's didn't have it that severe in comparison.
 

MDave

Member
Huh, am I the only one to notice that it sometimes goes below native 720p on the Switch screen? Not by a huge amount or anything and not very often, but it's definitely not 1:1 at times. To compensate for the frame drops that would otherwise happen in docked mode, I would imagine.

Thought DF would of caught that!
 

Hermii

Member
we will see. sometimes they don't give a fuck at all
and sometimes they go completely batshit insane.

just remember when they, in all seriousness, updated/patched the perfectly running Wii VC Starfox 64 rom to actually regain the original slowdown/framerate drops of the original N64 game.

lol

Crazy.
 
20fps was acceptable back then. Is it hard to go back to now? Sure, but you (well, I) get used to it after some time. Frequent severe drops you never get used to.

I can't get used to a game running consistently at 20fps. I had to wait for the 3DS Ocarina before I could enjoy it. I notice the drops in Breath of the Wild, and hope they can get fixed, but mostly they seem to happen outside of input sensitive gameplay.

The main reason I prefer playing docked is actually the surround sound. If not for that, I'd probably got portable to get the more stable 30 fps.

It's definitely a blemish on an awesome game, and I hope it gets fixed, but I'm not going to count on a fix.

I don't know how far in DF played but there is repeatable drops in mobile mode for me in Kakariko village.

Portable definitely drops in areas too. They're a lot more uncommon though.
 

KingSnake

The Birthday Skeleton
This game is designed around the 1gb memory limitation of the Wii U, so Switches 3.25 gb should be plenty.

I think it could be the cpu. 3 cores 1 ghz A57 is pretty slow.

Wii U clearly has issues when it has to handle a lot of data, like huge scenery and towns. So that limitation shows.

While Switch rather hits the RAM bandwidth limitation than the RAM capacity.
 

nynt9

Member
Just got to Zora's Domain, and I'm experiencing drops there even on handheld. The problem with analyses like this is that obviously they can only cover so much of the game and we can't expect them to put 30 hours into a game to see how some of the later game regions perform, and it makes sense for some more complex ares to perform worse.
 
He was being sarcastic.

He meant Horizon was a looker, open world, AAA, and had steady FPS.

It's also on hardware 5-8x (10-16x if we're talking Pro) more powerful than a docked Switch.

Having played the Switch version of BotW for about 20 hours and been into over half the areas I would say it's the long grass in sunshine that causes the most drops. I had previously thought it was the foliage in general but found a part last night where the only thing was long grass in sunny weather and the framerate was hard dropping to 20fps all the time. It's a memory bandwidth issue imo, it simply can't handle the grass at 900p.

Outside of the Great Plateau the game is 30fps 90-95% of the time in my experience so it's not a big deal to me but it would be good if they offered a 720p option for docked or further optimised docked mode.
 
It's also on hardware 5-8x (10-16x if we're talking Pro) more powerful than a docked Switch.

Having played the Switch version of BotW for about 20 hours and been into over half the areas I would say it's the long grass in sunshine that causes the most drops. I had previously though it was the foliage in general but found a part last night where the only thing was long grass and the framerate was hard dropping to 20fps all the time.

Outside of the Great Plateau the game is 30fps 90-95% of the time in my experience so it's not a big deal to me but it would be good if they offered a 720p option for docked or further optimised docked mode.

Tons have some bullshit perfomance. But the more I play the more I wonder how the fuck the plataeu passed QA as that is one of thee worst parts outside towns.
 

Alebrije

Member
Does Zelda runs at 900p docked because is a port from WiiU ? Are we going to see 1080p /60fps (dock) games in the future once they are developed enterely for Switch, I mean games like Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Skyrim?

Or what is the best we can expect from Switch as a home console?
 

Leatherface

Member
The worst frame rate drops for me so far have occurred in an area leading to the first temple/dungeon. It was constantly raining throughout the whole zone, on top of that I had to fight my way through enemies to get to point B and there were constant electricity effects. It was far worse than the great plateau. If this game wasn't so fucking awesome it would actually piss me off to tell you the truth.

REALLY hoping Nintendo patches a fix to this. The system should be able to run this smoothly.
 
Does Zelda runs at 900p docked because is a port from WiiU ? Are we going to see 1080p /60fps (dock) games in the future once they are developed enterely for Switch, I mean games like Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Skyrim?

Or what is the best we can expect from Switch as a home console?

It's gonna depend on the game. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is 720/60 in handheld and 1080/60 docked, an upgrade from the 720/60 it is on WiiU.

Splatoon 2, at least the demo that's been shown, is 720p/60 docked or handheld.
 
no way in hell it would ever run at 60fps even at 720p

Why not? When docked the Switch CPU is at least twice as fast as the Wii U CPU. Switch also has over 3x the ram for games (which is twice as fast) and the GPU is 2.25x the Wii U GPU.

We also don't know what kind of memory bandwidth solution Nintendo has added to Switch (if any) and when developers of certain games got access to the latest dev kits and if optimisation time was left before launch to implement the improvements.

Games like Fast Racing and MK8 Deluxe have no issue running the Wii U originals at over twice the resolution while still hitting 60fps which suggests that they have some solution to it (if it's a real issue).

Does Zelda runs at 900p docked because is a port from WiiU ? Are we going to see 1080p /60fps (dock) games in the future once they are developed enterely for Switch, I mean games like Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Skyrim?

Or what is the best we can expect from Switch as a home console?

It depends on the reasons BotW is struggling to hit 30fps at 900p. Launch games are never a good indication of a systems power, especially ports from other systems (see tons of terrible running PS4 remasters).
 

molnizzle

Member
I don't think Nintendo has ever come out with performance patches. There's a first time for everything, but considering how botw is met with universal appraise, they are less likely imp willing to spend time improving it(if it can be)

They've never done "expansion passes" either, but that's happening with BotW.

The fact that they're developing DLC for it gives me hope that they'll continue to optimize performance.
 

Leatherface

Member
They released a performance patch for Splatoon a few months after it came out to fix the framerate in the main hub area. I remember this clearly because it was a stuttery mess at first and then it was at least smooth.
 

RoadHazard

Gold Member
Just got to [REDACTED], and I'm experiencing drops there even on handheld. The problem with analyses like this is that obviously they can only cover so much of the game and we can't expect them to put 30 hours into a game to see how some of the later game regions perform, and it makes sense for some more complex ares to perform worse.

Do we really need location spoilers in a performance thread?! I mean, sure, I expected something like that to be in the game from the trailers, but still. Come on. Think.
 

Justinian

Member
They released a performance patch for Splatoon a few months after it came out to fix the framerate in the main hub area. I remember this clearly because it was a stuttery mess at first and then it was at least smooth.

I'm pretty sure other games have also featured "performance improvements" in patch notes.
 

ss_lemonade

Member
Does Zelda runs at 900p docked because is a port from WiiU ? Are we going to see 1080p /60fps (dock) games in the future once they are developed enterely for Switch, I mean games like Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Skyrim?

Or what is the best we can expect from Switch as a home console?
Probably depends, but I don't see why we wouldn't get 1080p60 games. Fast RMX is one already available that's 1080p 60fps and it looks pretty good.
 
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