In the absence of news about a Nintendo Switch successor, people have been taking it upon themselves to do what Nintendon’t. As spotted on the Famiiboards forums, YouTube user Naga went through the process of desoldering the Switch’s 4 GB of RAM to add two sticks for a total of 8 GB. Not only that but the RAM used was clocked at a higher frequency, providing better bandwidth and throughput for the system. The result?
The Switch runs games better!
While the results aren’t revelatory in terms of visual output, there is one incredibly surprising result. With this extra and faster RAM, the current Switch can actually render The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in 4K. It can’t really run the game well, producing about 12 FPS on average and dropping lower in heavy spots, but the fact that the Switch doesn’t explode when attempting to load the game is incredible.
The other titles tested by naga include Mortal Kombat 1, Kingdom Come Deliverance, and Alien Isolation. MK1 is still a mess of a port with ugly visuals and ridiculously long load times, but the uneven framerate during matches is mostly cleared up. Kingdom Come Deliverance basically holds to a steady 30 FPS and Alien Isolation actually approaches the 50 FPS mark at times.
The extra RAM afforded by 8 GB doesn’t automatically work on most Switch games. Due to the console specifications set by Nintendo, games often cannot read the extra memory without modification. They can make use of the extra clock speeds, however, and that is the most beneficial change. We’ve seen this before in Switch overclocking videos where people have managed to improve the performance of games by simply tweaking the frequencies of the RAM, GPU, and CPU.
For the time being, I don’t think modified Switch’s will become the norm. Nintendo has to know that people want information on the Switch 2, so we’re likely to learn about it sooner rather than later. It will hopefully be better than this modification.
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Written by Peter Glagowski
Peter has been a freelance gaming and film critic for over seven years. His passion for Nintendo is only matched by the size of his collection.
