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While it's still a real PITA to setup, the Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu has released what they call Project Hades, a massive rewrite to their shader decompiler which is a big thing for it.

In their fresh update blog post the team notes how it took them six months of work to accomplish with around 50,000 lines of code written but it's finally released. The result? They say it fixes "an innumerable amount of rendering bugs, reducing shader build times, improving compatibility, and increasing performance by over 30% for all GPU vendors" and is one of the biggest changes made to date.

Right now they're still keeping OpenGL as the default API but they're suggesting people test with Vulkan now too, as it should have a significant boost in performance and compatibility and that "rendering and shader build performance almost always beat OpenGL".

One of the major changes here is how they handle shader building with Vulkan, which uses all CPU threads to do it in parallel so it works your machine harder but the result is a much smoother first-time gameplay experience while it builds up a cache to load from. Their little example video shows what a striking difference it makes:

It's a very similar issue to what we see on Linux with Windows games run through Steam Play Proton, which is why Valve builds up a cache from users running it to then give out to other users through Steam downloads.

Lots more improvements were made to various games being emulated too including graphical fixes for Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, stuttering fixes for some games like Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild graphical fixes, Fire Emblem: Three Houses and more. The list of fixes is just enormous from serious issues to really odd problems, like some games having black borders if you moved them to a different monitor which they also solved.

Specifically for Linux the developers managed to solve Xenoblade Chronicles 2 crashing on Linux with Vulkan Mesa drivers and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword should perform much better on Linux with OpenGL Mesa. Another Linux specific one is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, with the Mesa developers pointing the Yuzu team in the right direction to fix the rune teleporting animation on modern Intel/AMD Mesa drivers.

Lots more so be sure to check the full blog post.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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21 comments
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elmapul Aug 14, 2021
if we can proper fund projects like this, to the point that linux has an equal or better performance than windows by the time steam deck relases, then more people should stay with steamOS
benjamimgois Aug 14, 2021
pineappleEA posts the latest versions of yuzu early access with linux specific patches in appimage format. Just double click and play. As he explains in his github, yuzu is opensource so there's no problems in downloading the EA source code.

https://github.com/pineappleEA/pineapple-src


TheRiddick Aug 14, 2021
Is there not a website with a collection of Switch games as Demo versions? does the switch have demo games that people can play for free?
jrt Aug 14, 2021
Performance improvements are great. Animal Crossing on the Steam Deck will be awesome!
kokoko3k Aug 14, 2021
Quoting: dude
Quoting: KristianIs there any reason this would not run or would run comparatively badly on a Steam Deck?

Not really. Considering the ongoing improvement and optimizations with emulators, the Deck will be great.
I dubt it would be enough powerfull on the cpu side, but i hope to be really wrong
drmoth Aug 15, 2021
Are there any games that run flawlessly on Yuzu or are they all still works in progress?
tuubi Aug 15, 2021
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Quoting: drmothAre there any games that run flawlessly on Yuzu or are they all still works in progress?
Looking at their compatibility list, there should be plenty. No idea if the list is up to date.
Slipie Aug 15, 2021
Quoting: kokoko3k
Quoting: dude
Quoting: KristianIs there any reason this would not run or would run comparatively badly on a Steam Deck?

Not really. Considering the ongoing improvement and optimizations with emulators, the Deck will be great.
I dubt it would be enough powerfull on the cpu side, but i hope to be really wrong

I've been able to run some games on my Ryzen 5 3500u in Yuzu.
New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe runs at a stable 60fps for instance (undocked).
That was before these optimisations were implemented.
I assume the Steam Deck APU is more capable than the 3500u.
Mezron Aug 15, 2021
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This all look interesting but I can not get pass the steps to get this up and running properly on POP OS 21.04. Is there a demo file I can use to see if this is working? Something like the homebrew stuff for other emulators.
Slipie Aug 16, 2021
Quoting: Arcadius-8606This all look interesting but I can not get pass the steps to get this up and running properly on POP OS 21.04. Is there a demo file I can use to see if this is working? Something like the homebrew stuff for other emulators.

Use this guide:
Github

And follow the firmware section of this Reddit thread to get even more games working:
Reddit
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