On many occasions, I’ve found that Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s performance tends to degrade the longer that I’m playing it: at its worst, I see a consistent 20FPS, music skipping during battles, and a general unpleasantness in the way the game looks. Which is odd because, according to people online, the game’s graphics and performance are much improved over XC2.
**Fortunately, I’ve found that closing the game, and then reopening it, restores the performance.** This implies that there is a memory leak somewhere in XC3 (put another way: something in the game continuously takes up memory, and the game never releases that memory, typically due to a programming bug. So, the game ends up needing to do a LOT of extra work to make space for other things, and/or eventually runs out of memory and crashes). If not a memory leak, then it’s possibly due to some process or routine that never gets killed.
Think I’m being crazy? Recall that XC2 ALSO had a documented memory leak (check [Digital Foundary’s video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnyKDzX7lqo) on XC2. They use tools to definitively diagnose framerate/resolution issues). Also note that [others have seemed to notice the same thing about XC3](https://old.reddit.com/r/Xenoblade_Chronicles/comments/witnih/psa_xenoblade_3_has_a_memory_leak_issue_if_the/). I tend to be sensitive to framerate issues, so given that XC2 had issues, I’m pretty confident that there IS, in fact, an issue.
Unlike Xenoblade 2, where the memory leak was due to a specific area, I haven’t been able to pinpoint WHAT causes the leak. But Mellick Medows (sp?) was where I noticed it the most.
And for more data points, my wife is also playing on HER switch, undocked. She’s actually experienced hard crashes, and notices that frequent resets tend to make the crashes appear less.
So just an FYI. The game tends to run GREAT, but over time, it degrades to the point of being distracting.