The launch of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is plagued with framerate issues.
The new region of Paldea brings a new world of possibilities to Pokémon Trainers. Gameplay blends in the traditional mainline Pokémon series alongside the innovations in Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Unfortunately, the game isn’t always up to the task.
While fans should be celebrating an all-new open-world adventure in the popular Nintendo franchise, we’re instead being treated to one of the worst Switch launches.
Technical issues are being reported everywhere, from Twitter to critic reviews. There’s one thing on the mind of fans: Pokémon Scarlet and Violet framerate issues.
Countless reviews on Metacritic all say the same thing: Scarlet and Violet could have been the best Pokémon game ever, but the technical issues cannot be ignored.
What Could Be Causing the Pokémon Scarlet and Violet Technical Issues
So what’s causing the poor frame rate for Pokémon Scarlet and Violet? A lot of people have some theories.
First, there’s the Nintendo Switch hardware itself. Believe it or not, the Nintendo Switch launched nearly six years ago, in March of 2017. It is already underpowered compared to the Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5. Add in the system’s age, and there’s an easy scapegoat for the Pokémon Scarlet and Violet technical issues. There’s just one problem with that theory: Breath of the Wild.
Launching alongside the Nintendo Switch hardware, Breath of the Wild is a beautiful game that proves Nintendo’s hardware can produce beautiful-looking games. The recently released Xenoblade Chronicles 3 reinforces this fact.
So if it’s not the hardware, the call may be coming from inside the house. Another theory involves The Pokémon Company forcing the game out in its current state. However, this theory, once again, doesn’t necessarily pass the sniff test.
There’s a good chance we’ll never know why Pokémon Scarlet and Violet launched with so many framerate issues, but we may have found the reasoning: a memory leak.
How To Fix Pokémon Scarlet and Violet Framerate Issues
The Twitter account for CentroPokemon has been hard at work searching for the cause and fix for the Pokémon Scarlet and Violet technical issues.
“Initially when we started testing the game for real we were having a terrible performance experience as the whole game was slowing down and browsing suffered a lot,” they said in a Tweet.
After rebooting when that happens the experience changes completely. If you’re having more performance issues than usual, please restart the game. It seems that restarting the game alleviates the problems a bit, so probably what is currently happening is some kind of memory leak.”
After further testing, they concluded that a memory leak occurs when you enter the city.
It may not be ideal, but restarting the game when these technical hiccups arise is solving the issue. Specifically, restarting when leaving a city can solve the problem.
CentroPokemon also believes that a patch can fix the Pokémon Scarlet and Violet framerate issues. Nintendo has not yet commented on the matter.
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are available now for Nintendo Switch.
