Unofficial Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom PC port runs sluggish on RTX 4060 Ti, modder estimates 2-4 week release

It appears that there's a fan-made PC port of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom out there which shows us how it might play on PC in a native console port scenario. Why is this important? Well, it proves that games like those exclusive on the Switch are playable on PC hardware even if it's currently in a state that's far from pretty. Modder NotRexed has posted some initial footage to show that, yes, the game is technically playable on PC.

Modder NotRexed creates native PC port of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom with AI-assisted recompilation

It's worth noting that this is a case of playing Nintendo's exclusive game without the Switch itself. A piece of (unofficial) software is transpiling the game's code into something that's compatible with PCs. And NotRexed, who is the modder behind this port, has only been working on this for a couple of days and got this far.

The goal is a standalone executable that's not an emulated one. That's usually a better experience in terms of performance and compatibility.

So, how's it performing? Well, it's pretty terrible as of right now. For instance, the game is only playing at 32 – 59 FPS if you have a GeForce RTX 4060 Ti GPU.

This performance is 'sluggish' according to the modder which means there's still a lot of optimizing that needs to happen before this is a PC port you can use every day. The way it's currently performing shows us that the AI-driven recompile (which is what this is) is working. But it's definitely not the most efficient at the moment.

In two to four weeks, NotRexed says the game will be ready for wider release (this is just an estimate and can vary). Obviously, it's a work-in-progress and as they improve the code, things may shift. The work here seems to be using AI tools to help with the process of recompile, which we've seen in other recent fan-made ports. Nintendo hasn't said anything yet, but a DMCA strike is coming from the company if the port gets released into the public.

This fan-made project shows that there's definitely growing demand for native PC ports of Nintendo's first party games. This one isn't complete, or fast enough. But it does show us that, yes, it can be technically done as a native port.

So, for those eager to play Tears of the Kingdom on PC, you'll have to wait for Nintendo to make official announcements about it. The mod isn't quite stable or ready to be shared safely just yet.