There's Apparently an Easy Fix to Pokemon Scarlet and Violet's Performance Issues

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet players have a couple of options to fixing the game's ongoing performance issues. Today's the launch day for Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, the newest pair of Pokemon games by Game Freak. However, many fans have discovered that the game is plagued by occasional graphics issues, leading to the games receiving the second lowest Metacritic score of any Pokemon game made in the last ten years. According to Centro Pokemon, the issues are caused by a "memory leak," a programming issue in which the game continuously uses more and more of the Nintendo Switch's available memory as the game goes on. A memory leak would certainly cause the performance issues in the game, and even more importantly, could be patched in a future update. 

In the meantime, there are two easy fixes to "fix" the performance issues caused by the memory leak, which involve functionally forcing the game to reset. The first is to literally restart your game, which releases the unused memory. The other solution is to head to Mesagoza and enter and then leave the city. Because Mesagoza has a different map than the open world areas, players can quickly force the game to do a soft reset, which should stop the memory leak. 

Obviously, neither of these are perfect solutions and players may need to do this every time they encounter slow performance issues. Let's hope that Game Freak quickly releases a patch in the next month or two that improves the performance of the game permanently. 

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are available now on the Nintendo Switch. You can follow our full coverage here.