3DS OoT remake runs great!

The touchscreen even works!

Well, beyond a few slight audio sync hiccups in a few cinematic cutscenese… but I think most of that was/is from the shader render compiler suddenly jumping into overdrive upon seeing something new for the first time…seems to be better on subsequent renders with those shaders now already compiled.

BotW is however… a bit more finnicky.

I would probably have to figure out how to …somehow manually decrease the draw distance in the overworld, or possibly make or acquire some kind of lower res texture pack, to get it to run at at least 30 fps consistently.

And/or just always have half res/rate shading going on… this kinda works, technically, but often looks like ass because of how much of BotW appears to basically be made out of emmisive textures / bloom-like shaders, as opposed to proper lighting sources.

Or maybe run it at like 1/2 or 3/4 res and rely on a huge amount of FSR upscaling?

… I have literally 0 experience modding emulated games… my brain is thinking in pc game modding mode, from about 25 years of experience fucking around with that.

It sure would be neat if there was just an actual graphics option menu in the game…

… But also, afaik, a Switch can also barely maintain BotW at 30 fps, soooo … ?

Other than BotW… literally everything I’ve tried from the PS2/360/GC+Wii era backward runs fine.

(Beyond me realizing how utterly ass many of the control schemes of older games are, hahah!)

For other Switch games… SSBrawl runs well, latest Animal Crossing runs well (55 to 60 fps, generally).

…

The Deck also has something of a neat trick where if you can get a solid 45 fps in anything…well, lock the fps to that, and the screen refresh to 90hz, and it often ends up feeling as visually smooth as actual 90 fps, in everything other than very fast paced games.

(You could also do this with 30/90, as thats a clean 1 to 3 ratio… but 30 fps is still… quite noticeably slow, imo, but it may make sense for some people/in some games),

I’ve managed to fiddle around with Cyberpunk 77 and get it to almost always hold 45 fps, via fucking about with settings, using DeckyFrameGen to get better FrameGen and Upscaling… and also basically by just turning off ambient occlusion and volumetric fog, which allows many other settings I find more impactful to be higher than the graphics preset for Deck… and then using the 45/90 thing, it looks and feels quite smooth.

I’m getting between 3100 and 3200 actually rendered frames in the built in benchmark, and I think the default Deck preset, pre fuckery, I was getting more like 2300 ish… so thats roughly a 30% boost compared to stock… and imo, this also just looks better, and somehow also has a bit less power draw.

I have always fucking hated ambient occlusion, making blob corner shadows that often just do not make physical sense given the actual scene, and also often fuck up badly whenever very thin geometry or mesh/fence like textures are involved…

Volumetric fog on the other hand looks great, but has always been massively compute expensive… and if you can just actually have higher lighting and shadow quality settings, and higher texture res on the rest of the scene… imo thats a good tradeoff.

…

Whoop, so doubling back a bit:

https://www.shacknews.com/article/99271/zelda-breath-of-the-wild-performance-and-framerate-dips-detailed

Apparently the FPS problem is worse for BotW… in docked mode. Dropping down to near 20 fps in the scenarios they described is…exactly what I experienced as well.

… The other Switch games.I’ve messed with tend to be a bit faster and more stable in docked mode.

So… maybe, apparently, I should just emulate BotW in… portable mode?

???