Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mods have already unlocked the framerate to 60 fps—but you shouldn't use them just yet
Remember the era of PC games that would run at double speed if you unlocked their draconian fps limits? It's rare for PC games these days not to support dynamic framerates, but it's more common on consoles like the Nintendo Switch, where developers know exactly how much (or how little) processing power they have to work with. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is designed with a 30 fps cap, and mods have already been able to remove that cap and trick the game into running at 60 fps… if your PC can handle it. But given Tears of the Kingdom's early state of emulation, not even a mighty gaming rig can keep Tears of the Kingdom running at 60 fps all the time.
And when the framerate drops, get ready for slow motion.
Why does this happen in emulation, when most games can handle a drop in framerate without also slowing down the game's internal clock?
«Typically PC games are not bound to the rendering speed, but instead the game logic runs at the same speed, no matter what fps you reach,» explains veteran emulation programmer Robert Peip, who's currently developing a Nintendo 64 core for the MiSTer project. Peip says that you can see this kind of slowdown in modern games in extreme cases—if you drop below 5 fps, for example, the game logic probably can't function normally—but they can typically tolerate a fair amount of fluctuation.
«In emulation there is sometimes a hard fps limit, eg, in Breath of the Wild the game logic for physics was bound to 30 fps max. That's why mods for 60 fps are needed. When you apply a 60 fps mod and cannot reach it, the game will not update the game logic often enough and the game slows down. This was even more present in older 2D titles that ran at fixed fps all the time.»
Slowdown isn't
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