Remember the days when PC games could run twice as fast once you lifted the hard fps limit? It’s rare that modern PC games don’t support dynamic framerates, but consoles like the Nintendo Switch , is more general because developers know exactly how much (or how much) processing power they need to use. The Legend of Zelda: Kingdom of Tears was designed with a 30 fps cap, and mods are already able to remove that cap and trick the game into running at 60 fps…if your PC can handle it. However, given the initial state of Tears of the Kingdom’s emulation, even powerful gaming devices cannot keep Tears of the Kingdom running at his 60 fps. all time.
Get ready for slow motion when the frame rate drops.
Most games can handle framerate drops without slowing down the game’s internal clock, so why does emulation do this?
“Typically, PC games aren’t tied to rendering speed, but instead the game logic runs at the same speed no matter what fps you hit,” explains veteran emulation programmer Robert Pape. . Development of the Nintendo 64 Core For MiSTer project. Peip says modern games see this kind of slowdown in extreme cases, but if you go below, say, 5 fps, the game logic may not work properly, but it’s usually a fair amount of variation. is permissible.
“Sometimes in emulation there are hard fps limits. For example in Breath of the Wild the physics game logic was capped at 30 fps max. So you need a 60 fps mod. 60 fps If you apply mods but can’t reach it, the game logic isn’t updated often enough and the game slows down, especially in older 2D titles that always ran at fixed fps. was.”
Slowness isn’t the only problem with modding Tears of the Kingdom to 60 fps. Again, the game is programmed to run at a certain speed, so pre-rendered cutscenes run twice as fast as he does.
At the pace emulator developers are currently at, optimizations could lead to a more stable 60 fps in the coming months. But a more timely solution is his mod for the game that allows it to run at dynamic framerates. This means that your game logic will still run consistently at 60fps or 37fps.
Early Friday morning, a Reddit poster unveiled a “beta” dynamic FPS mod for Tears of the Kingdom, claiming it would work side-by-side with the existing 60 fps mod, smoothing out performance when framerate drops. . Still in development, but there are some notable issues like animations like fire still playing at the wrong speed and cutscenes still running twice as long as him. It also doesn’t solve the weird side effect of the 60 fps patch (causing the screen to go dark while swapping weapons).
Such mods for emulated games are usually memory patches that temporarily change functionality by tweaking certain values in memory. This is a form of modding that is lighter than actually modifying the game’s files, as it just drops a small text file into the mod folder that the emulator reads when the game loads. However, creating a memory patch requires an understanding of how the game works and usually requires some research and a fair amount of trial and error.
So why did the above mod come out so soon after Tears of the Kingdom’s release? Well… they didn’t.
Some of these patches arrived before Tears of the Kingdom was even released, and they were making piracy links obnoxiously blatant. The reddit person behind the dynamic fps mod has been posting the hack on the r/NewYuzuPiracy subreddit since Tears of the Kingdom was leaked, and the 60 fps mod was also posted well before the official release. So even though his mod in question is actually a small text file containing dozens of lines of code, I’d rather avoid both.
The link to copyright infringement doesn’t stop many users from downloading them. And now that the game is public, it’s easy for who and how to mod it to be overlooked or unrecognized. But this looks bad for the whole emulation scene. Also, for players dutifully dumping their own copy of Tears of the Kingdom to play via emulation, his current mods are not made the same way and play by the rules. It’s a shame there isn’t.
Now that Tears of the Kingdom is out, there are dedicated modders working on the case. They’ve come up with ultrawide aspect ratio hacks, disabling dynamic resolution, and framerate unlocking for other Switch games before. As listed on the Yuzu Emulator site here. It’s only a matter of time before we develop a mod that enables dynamic framerates without the black screen issues that affect current 60fps mods. Until then, I’ll stick with the native unmodified 30 fps, which already looks very promising up to 4K.
