Can *Tears of the Kingdom* Run at 45 FPS? This Time It’s Really Not Just a Gimmick

With a finger resting on the joystick, at the very moment Link leaps from the edge of the ruins, if the image were smoother, the winds of all Hyrule would seem to brush right past the back of your neck. The difference is not exactly explosive, but it feels a lot like a dark corridor suddenly losing a layer of fog: your eyes notice it first, and only afterward does your body catch up. Recently, creator Alucardio - Mundo Switch posted a video demonstrating a way to let The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom break past the Switch’s original 30FPS limit. For players sensitive to how action feels, that is admittedly a little tempting.

From the information currently available, this method is not limited to Tears of the Kingdom alone; some Switch games locked at 30FPS can also be handled with a similar approach. The tools mentioned in the video are FPSLocker and Ultrahand. Depending on their stability requirements, players can cap the frame rate at 40FPS or 45FPS instead of pushing straight to more aggressive numbers. On second thought, this is actually the more pragmatic approach, because handheld performance is not some horror movie monster with an endless health bar. If you force it upward too hard, the cost will always come knocking.

What is even more unsettling is that many players’ first reaction is not “can it run more smoothly,” but “will it damage the machine.” Some people in the comments directly asked about safety, including whether it could harm the console, whether temperatures would rise, and whether the Switch’s performance burden would increase significantly. In response, Alucardio was very clear: "Without overclocking, the overall risk is low and it will not cause obvious damage to the console." That is at least somewhat reassuring, but do not relax too soon—reduced battery life and increased processor load are still very real trade-offs.

What really requires caution, instead, is the kind of extreme route some players love to take. The original text already warns that "it is not recommended to enable 60FPS and FPSLocker at the same time, otherwise the game may crash." It is like in a horror movie when someone hears a noise in the basement and still insists on going down alone—if something goes wrong, it is hardly undeserved. Rather than chasing a paper-perfect 60 frames, keeping Tears of the Kingdom steady at 40 or 45 frames may be the more worthwhile upgrade to the experience, and at least it will not turn smoothness into a new source of instability.

If you ask me whether it is worth the trouble, my view is simple: players who care about responsiveness and can accept shorter battery life may want to pay attention; ordinary users who just want a stable playthrough and are unwilling to bear the cost of tinkering can simply take a look and move on. After all, the charm of Tears of the Kingdom has never been just about frame rate. Its exploration, physics interactions, and open-ended design are already enough to carry a long adventure. It is just that now, this adventure comes with one more option—not by piling fear into noise, but by quietly placing “smoother performance” into your hands, like that slow-boiling, creeping sense of pressure.