I’ve got an OLED TV and I love playing games on it. It’s a 55-inch LG C1 Series, which I chose because Gamespot rated it the best 4K TV for gaming, and it's easy to see why. The 120Hz refresh rate, impeccable HDR, and perfect black levels make it the ideal display for PS5 and Xbox Series X. I just played Star Wars Jedi: Survivor on it and I was blown away by the richness of the colors and the incredible contrast that HDR allows. I finished Jedi: Survivor just in time for the launch of Tears of the Kingdom, which I cued up precisely at midnight on Friday, just like everyone else. In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have gone directly from a game that pushes the PS5’s capabilities like Survivor straight into Tears of the Kingdom, because it made it incredibly difficult to ignore how terrible Zelda looks.You can put your pitchforks away, for I am not a Zelda hater. It’s difficult for me to sit here writing this right now because all I want to do is jump back into Hyrule and smash a bunch of gizmos and gadgets together with Ultrahand. It’s been an incredible experience so far and I’m confident that it’s worth all the praise it’s receiving, but let’s be honest: Tears of the Kingdom can be difficult to look at, especially on a nice big TV.Related: This Is The Perfect Year For A New Donkey KongIt’s no secret that the Switch is underpowered. We’ve reached a point where the capacity of games and the ambition of developers has surpassed what Nintendo’s hardware is capable of. The visual quality of Tears of the Kingdom is significantly throttled by the Switch, particularly in docked mode. Resolution is low, targeting 900p while docked and upscaled to 1080p using the (pretty lousy) AMD FSR1 spatial upscaler, while the frame rate is at mostly-stable 30fps - until you start monkeying with Ultrahand in some of the more crowded areas - but to be honest, neither of those factors take much away from the experience.We tend to overemphasize the importance of resolution and frame rate when talking about performance and ignore the smaller, more difficult to define qualities that have a big impact on the way the game looks. Tears of the Kingdom really struggles in the little details, which quickly add up to create a big problem.

Take a look at the video above, but ignore the resolution, which has been compressed beyond recognition by Twitter anyway. As Link descends the steps, you should immediately notice that all of the shadows on the right side are flickering at the speed of Link’s footsteps. If you look at the yellow grass spread around the area, you’ll notice a very similar effect. When you look at the entire picture, it is almost as if the whole world is vibrating. You may also notice that the image gets sharper when Link stops moving - this is by design apparently, and that when the camera turns towards the end there’s a jittery, stuttering effect.

If you have a lot of experience tinkering with graphics settings, these should all be things that are easy to identify. The flickering effect you see everywhere is called aliasing. It’s a graphical defect that makes curves look jagged instead of smooth. You’ll see this often in diagonal lines that look segmented, typically at the edges of objects. As you change perspective by moving your character or turning your camera, the pixels that are representing those curved lines shift from one position to another, which gives the effect that the line is flickering.

There’s a lot of anti-aliasing techniques that games use to smooth out those edges, but they have an impact on performance, and the game can barely hold at 30fps as it is. Hence, no anti-aliasing in Tears of the Kingdom.

A lot of compromises have been made to get Tears of the Kingdom running on the Switch. Low shadow detail is what makes them look rough and pixelated, the low draw distance is what makes distant objects suddenly appear or become sharper as you get closer to them. Sometimes when looking at a densely drawn area, a layer of fog will materialize to obscure what you’re looking at. All of these overlapping compromises detract from the beautiful and immersive world Nintendo created for Tears of the Kingdom. The bigger your screen is, the harder they are to ignore.

I got a big fancy TV so I can enjoy games to the fullest, but it’s making Tears of the Kingdom a worse experience. My recommendation is that you play Zelda on the smallest screen you can. It looks much nicer on the Switch OLED at 720p, but heck, you can go even smaller. Play it on one of those tiny LCDs they use for Raspberry Pi computers. Play it on your car’s 4-inch backup camera. Put your Switch in the kitchen and stand in the hallways so that the screen is as small as it can possibly be. Tears of the Kingdom is a great game, but the less of it you can see, the better.

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