‘Pokémon Scarlet’ and ‘Violet’: How to improve poor performance on Nintendo Switch

Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet might be the most expansive entries in the Pokémon franchise yet. But the step forward has come with unfortunate consequences for the gamers who wish to give the games a go, with reports of poor performance coming out of both games. The reports are not overblown, with players clipping through the floor and the game stuttering when you move into battle.

While a patch might be pushed for the games, we have not been graced with one yet. So Pokémon fans — as resourceful as they — are, have managed to find ways around the devastating bugs, albeit they are not foolproof. Let’s take a look at how you might be able to fix the performance issues that you might be having in Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet.

How to fix your Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet performance issues

Keep in mind that just because these methods may have worked for a handful of people, they might not work for everyone, but it is worth a shot if your game is running at anything you may deem unacceptable. The original Nintendo Switch and the OLED model can be played in two different ways, handheld and docked. Apparently, at least according to this YouTube video, when it comes to Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet they run much better when playing handheld than when docked into your television. Hopefully, this method works for you, as the mainline Pokémon games have been traditionally on handheld consoles anyway, so it should not be a hard thing to acclimate to. 

According to one of the popular Pokémon fan news accounts on Twitter, you can apparently fix some of the issues with your game if you restart it. We do not mean restarting the game from scratch of course, but rather closing your game and booting it back up again. Centro Pokémon tweets, “Based on our testing, the biggest issue we have, the framerate drops, appear to come from a memory leak or similar when you are near towns or cities.” 

Now, they do go on to say that they have tested whether or not this fixes the game, and every time they performed their tests this method did work. But, are you willing to take the time to restart your game, or would you rather just sit through the bugs? Those Nintendo Switch load times are no joke. Unfortunately, other than those two methods, the Pokémon community has been unable to come up with another solution. Hopefully Game Freak patches it soon, at least to improve the stability of the game. But we will have to wait and see if they do.