The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild received its first post-launch patch on the Switch and Wii U last week, presumably fixing a good chunk of the calamitous frame rate issues blighting Hyrule. Thanks to the good folks over at Digital Foundry, we now have official confirmation of that being the case, along with a much more in depth analysis of the title’s general performance boost.
For Switch owners, many frame rate dips were removed, resulting in entire stretches of 20fps gameplay showing markedly noticeable improvements. In-game visuals themselves remain identical to the pre-patch version, with no graphical downgrading, loss in draw distance or costs to dynamic resolution scaling. While by no means perfect, even Hyrule’s most intensive areas, like the notoriously busy Korok Forest, received a small bump in fluidity.
Unfortunately, the Wii U version doesn’t really benefit from the new update much, sporting nearly identical performance. Even areas causing issues in both Switch’s docked mode and the Wii U were left unceremoniously unaltered on the older hardware. As it stands right now, an undocked Switch still remains the smoothest way to experience Breath of the Wild’s expansive world.
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Written by Matthew Weidner
When it comes to playing and writing about video games, Matthew aspires to be the very best, like no one ever was. Writing for Nintendo Wire and the thought of one day finally achieving a perfect, no death Super Meat Boy run fills him with determination.
