Optimizing a 2D Godot Game for the Nintendo Switch. My first-hand experience

📰 New article from Wololo.net

Optimizing a 2D Godot Game for the Nintendo Switch. My first-hand experience

https://wololo.net/2026/01/21/optimizing-a-2d-godot-game-for-the-nintendo-switch-my-first-hand-experience/

Ever tried squeezing a PC‑born Godot card game onto a Switch and watched it crawl at 1 FPS? That was my reality until I started treating the console like a picky roommate—clean up, cache what you can, and stop asking it to do everything every frame.

First off, I slashed the base resolution from 1080p to 720p. It sounds trivial, but that alone nudged the framerate up by 7‑10 FPS. Next came a cache‑overhaul: repeated string lookups and card‑copying were eating cycles like nobody’s business, so I stored results once and reused them, scoring a 95 % hit rate.

I also stopped stuffing every invisible card into the scene tree. Unused nodes were still being ticked, so I pulled them out and kept references in plain variables—instant CPU relief. Finally, I migrated most logic out of `_process()` to signals or one‑off calls; if something truly needs per‑frame updates, it’s now as lean as possible.

TL;DR: lower resolution, cache aggressively, prune the node tree, and keep `_process()` to a minimum. With those “low‑hanging fruits,” my Switch build jumped from a sluggish crawl to a respectable 20‑25 FPS, proving even modest 2D titles can run smoothly on portable hardware when you tidy up the code.