The most recent builds of the Yuzu Switch emulator offer significant performance improvements of up to 87% on both low-end APUs and high-end setups.
The team behind the Yuzu project has been making impressive progress since this open-source free Switch emulator was released in 2018. Not only has performance and compatibility been greatly improved, but the team behind the project has also successfully implemented local wireless multiplayer. An interesting tidbit is that, as covered earlier this week, the emulator also appears to be able to run the upcoming The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom at 60FPS – copies of the game appeared out in the wild and people managed to get the game running on PC.
Yesterday, the Yuzu team published its progress report for the month of April, and in it, the team detailed some of the changes that have been implemented. One of the most substantial changes in recent builds is that most of the old buffer cache has been rewritten, resulting in performance gains of up to 87% (50% on average) and impressive rendering on normal GPU accuracy. Prior to this change, most titles required High GPU accuracy in order to render correctly. “Additionally, all this wizardry reduces bandwidth usage and boosts performance up to 87% for everyone (50% on average), from the low-end APUs to the high-end beasts”, the team behind the project writes on its website. Comparison stats for the most popular Switch games have also been included in the report, highlighting the FPS boost in the newer Yuzu builds compared to mainline build 1407. As noted by the team, the mainline 1407 build uses High GPU accuracy, while the mainline 4121 build uses normal GPU accuracy. The results are impressive, to say the least, especially in titles such as Pokémon Sword, Pokémon Legends:Arceus, Mario Odyssey, Link’s Awakening, Metroid Prime Remastered, and Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
As mentioned by the team, those using a Zen 4 3D V-cache chip can expect even higher FPS numbers with a non-3D 7900X achieving 90 FPS on some occasions.
Another nice addition in the recent Yuzu builds is the addition of Auto-HDR for Windows 11 users playing on an HDR-compatible display. This automatically enables HDR, improves the dynamic range, offers borderless optimizations, improves input lag, frame sync, and more.
There are plenty of other changes and improvements that the team has made, and we highly suggest reading the full report for April here. The Yuzu Switch emulator is available now for free here. Of course, you will need to legally own the copies of the Switch games that you want to emulate on PC.
