One of the big weaknesses of the Nintendo Switch was its memory. This console It has only 4GB of single LPDDR4, part of which is consumed by the operating system and applications, which means that as a result, games have less than 4 GB available. For context, the Xbox One and PS4 had 8GB of unified memory, with about 5GB of that being free.

Would increasing the amount of memory available on the Nintendo Switch really make a significant difference? The answer is yes, without a doubt. A well-known YouTuber unsoldered the memory of his Nintendo Switch OLED and changed the 2 GB modules to two 4 GB modules, which allowed it to double the amount of available memory.

Going from 4GB to 8GB makes the Nintendo console possible improve performance in some games and run others at higher resolutions. For example, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom could run in 4K (it runs at 1080p upscaled in docked mode), although admittedly the frame rate isn’t good at that resolution. All in all, it’s still an achievement for this console, which, I remind you, has an NVIDIA Maxwell GPU with only 256 shaders.

Other games like Mortal Kombat 1, Kingdom Come Deliverance and Alien Isolation fared much better by increasing the amount of available memory. To further refine the results, the YouTuber used some overclocking. In the video, we can see not only the tests, but also the consumption of resources and the operating frequency thanks to the counter located in the upper left corner.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in 4K is moving to approx average 12 FPS in forest area, although in other maps the performance is slightly better, reaching up to 15 FPS. It exceeds 20 FPS indoors. This game has CPU usage between 19% and 32% and GPU usage that stays between 96% and 99%.

The amount of memory used to move The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in 4K is almost 7.3 GB. In Alien Isolation, memory consumption also increases and becomes 7.33 GB. I leave you with a video that is definitely not in vain and confirms how important the memory and care that the big N should take with this matter on the Nintendo Switch 2.