Pokemon Scarlet & Violet players are experiencing extreme framerate drops and are having to restart "every hour or two" to keep the game running at 30fps. It's recommended that you do this particularly after leaving a city, as the area will seemingly stay loaded even after you've left, hurting the game's performance.
This comes as videos spread across social media, showing Scarlet & Violet running poorly in many areas. Framerate drops have been documented when doing everything from battling, catching Pokemon, and even just walking around. There's no word on whether a fix is on the way, so in the meantime, fans should expect to have to restart their game fairly frequently if they want to avoid performance issues.
"I've noticed a big increase in performance if the application is restarted once every hour or two," says Reddit user Ophium. "I imagine it's a memory leak issue. It was most noticeable in the towns, went from 15fps to 30."
This theory that memory leak issues cause the fps drops is one shared by Pokemon news account, Centro. They were among the first users to share that regularly restarting the game improves the performance, encouraging others to turn it off and on again whenever they leave a city.
A memory leak problem would mean that the game is poorly managing how much is loaded at once, not freeing up space once you've left an area, therefore making it unnecessary to have it loaded and ready to go. This theory makes sense, as the framerate issue becomes worse when you leave a city. This would mean that the game is simultaneously loading the city you were in and the new area you entered. Restarting the game gets rid of this, only loading the location you're in.
It will be a pain to play like this, but it seems to be the only way to avoid very noticeable framerate drops for now. With any luck, a patch will address this.