Notorious bugs and other flaws have plagued Pokémon Scarlet and Violet since its release, but multiple methods have been discovered over time that improves the game's performance for players struggling to optimize their experience. While none of these solutions are 100% guaranteed to quickly fix every problem players may be having, the experimentation with these options could at least ease the stress on hardware or software that results in these drops in performance. Players that notice these issues within their gameplay are recommended to not only check their personalized settings, but also discover which methods work best for them when making adjustments.
Performance in Pokémon Scarlet & Violet may be improved through playing in handheld mode over docked, reducing resolution, restarting the game, or even installing the game to system memory instead of a microSD card. The Frames Per Second (FPS) needed to showcase the flashy transformations of Tera type Pokémon in Pokémon Scarlet & Violet are less emphasized when players commit to playing in handheld mode. Textures and other visual references have been reported to run smoother in handheld mode compared to docked, where high-resolution televisions may push the graphical settings of the game far beyond what it was designed for, which has been speculated to be around 720P.
Solutions for Improving Performance in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet
Reducing the resolution when running the game for players that still wish to dock their Nintendo Switch helps prevent the game from trying to upscale to 1080P instead of the intended 720P. Rendering new areas of the Paldea Region takes up part of the game's performance, so players that limit the resolution allow the systems to focus on revealing those sections quickly instead of working on the overworked visual fidelity simultaneously.
Saving and restarting after obtaining a Pokémon with a Hidden Ability in Pokémon Scarlet & Violet or after completing a major story point may also help to improve performance. Longer sessions of play have been seen to be responsible for many bugs that turn up the longer players engage with the game without resetting the memory cache by turning Pokémon Scarlet & Violet off. Cleaning the stored data this way removes the possibility of a memory leak, which could translate into a sluggish stutter that prolongs loading times and causes various glitches.
Players that manage where their data goes might find themselves alleviating certain problems, especially if their copy of Pokémon Scarlet & Violet was a digital purchase. Typically, the saved progress for the online version gets saved to a microSD card, which players can change to their Nintendo Switch's direct system memory by selecting it through the "Data Management" settings. Capturing Pokémon in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet creates a wide array of data, which becomes easier for a player's device to access if there is a more direct route to that information, improving the performance of the game's mechanics as a result.
