Switch Emulator: Yuzu dramatically improves AMD GPU Speed, adds 8x upscaling, fixes rendering issues in Fire Emblem Engage, Nier Automata, Pokemon, & more

The beginning of the year has been packed with improvements for the Yuzu Switch emulator, for which the team have just shared a lengthy blog post. And of course we’re reaping the benefits of these changes in their latest release (download link below). Switch emulation on PC is pretty much flawless these days, whether you choose Yuzu or its competitor Ryujinx, so what we’re seeing nowadays are great performance improvements or even crazy optimizations such as 8K resolution support.

The development team behind have shared some nice improvements thanks to developer epicboy, namely some pretty big rendering issues on AMD GPUs have been fixed. (see screenshots below)

What is Yuzu

yuzu is an experimental open-source emulator for the Nintendo Switch from the creators of Citra.

It is written in C++ with portability in mind, with builds actively maintained for Windows and Linux.

“Experimental” feels a bit misleading at this point: the project is still very much work in progress, but already has an impressive compatibility list, with roughly 70% of Switch games playable from start to finish.

Yuzu Nintendo Switch Emulator – What’s new

The team have shared lots of significant updates, in particular a massive change to the shaders caching process, meaning that on some specific configurations (AMD GPUs in particular), caching that used to take up to 15 minutes in some games such as Xenoblade Chronicles now only takes seconds! Talk about an improvement! The update also apparently helps other configurations other than AMD GPUs, although not to that impressive scale.

Other improvements include a plethora of rendering issue fixes, such as fixes for multisampled textures or support for geometry shader passthrough.

There are also of course game specific fixes, and the team decided to add resolution upscaling options up to 8x. While they absolutely do not recommend 8x upscale (which allegedly the RTX 4090 can actually handle on a handful of games), they say 7x is achievable by the RX 6950 XT, and most modern GPUs will be able to handle 1.5x without a problem (while 2x might be hit and miss unless you have a fairly recent GPU). Upscaling greatly improves the rendering on decent monitors, so do give it a try!

The recent Yuzu releases also add enhancements to the MacOS version of the Switch emulator, and improves JoyCon support with a new custom driver.

For more details on the recent changes in Yuzu, check their latest update report!

Download the Latest Yuzu Release

You can download the latest Yuzu Release from the Nintendo switch Emulator’s official download page here. Make sure to select “manual Download” to get the latest build.

Source: yuzu emulator