How To Make Pokémon Scarlet And Violet Run Better On Your Switch

It should come as no surprise that vast open-world games like Pokémon Scarlet and Violet sometimes struggle to run on the Nintendo Switch. It’s a five-year-old device running an Nvidia Tegra X1 chip, which is quite old. With all that said, fans of the game still want to enjoy it with a stutter-free experience, but is it possible to do?

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While we can’t guarantee whether it will become stutter-free or not, what we can do is provide you with tips and tricks that you can use to squeeze every extra bit of performance that you can from your Switch while playing Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. If that sounds interesting, then read on below to find out how.

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How To Increase The Performance Of Pokémon Scarlet And Violet

Even though it can be argued that the Nintendo Switch is dated hardware, It is no secret that Game Freak has yet to successfully optimize Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. With the Switch library consisting of many other impressive open-world games like Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it is obviously possible to make a game like this run well. 

However, the player themselves can take some measures to try and improve the performance of the game. Unfortunately, the Nintendo Switch is not a modifiable PC, so the number of steps that can be taken to improve the Switch’s performance is limited.

Play In Handheld Rather Than Docked

For the uninitiated, once you put the Nintendo Switch in the docked mode, it switches its output resolution to 1080p from 720p in handheld mode. Therefore if you want to improve performance, you should be playing in 720p rather than 1080p, as it decreases the load on the system.

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Using System Storage Rather Than SD Card

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is a massive game both in terms of its open-world scale and game size. Due to the gigantic size of the game’s textures, it cannot load all of them up in Switch’s memory; therefore, it has to continuously fetch them from the system storage. 

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Now, if you have a cheap SD card installed, this could create a bottleneck for you as cheaper cards have slower transfer speeds. Thus the Switch will be throttled when it continuously accesses the textures from your SD card, causing the in-game stutters. The fix for this would be to either buy a new expensive SD card or simply download the game on Switch’s internal storage.

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Restarting The Game

The easiest and surefire way to improve the performance of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is to either play in short intervals or to save, quit and reload the game often. During extended playthroughs, the game builds up more and more data that it has to keep track of. Usually, this isn’t a problem, but with how poorly optimized Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are, this starts to throttle the performance of the game.

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Most users in online forums and reviews have stated that if you save and restart the game, then that rids of the random lags and stutters. Therefore this seems to be the easiest and surefire way to instantly improve the gameplay of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet.

Final Thoughts

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is a monumental addition to the franchise, featuring a breathtaking world and gorgeous graphics. However, due to poor optimization and rushed development, Game Freak has failed to deliver on the quality of the game. Still, players can utilize some of the aforementioned methods to improve their gameplay experience to some degree.