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Nintendo Switch emulator yuzu gets a huge performance boost

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Emulation coding is tricky business done by some people that are clearly 100x smarter than I am, and now the Nintendo Switch emulator yuzu devs are just showing off.

In their April 2023 progress report, they talked about a big performance improvement landing thanks to a rewrite of most of their old buffer cache code, plus work in other areas. The result is that you could see up to 87% better performance, although they said for most people it will probably be about 50%.

Just look at these differences (click to enlarge):

They said nothing special is needed to get this boost, you just need to be up to date and set GPU accuracy to "Normal".

Plenty more was mentioned like asynchronous presentation with Vulkan, which is behind a tickbox, because in some cases it might make frametimes less consistent but for a lot of people it might actually make things smoother. It needs more testing for them to be sure where to enable it.

The Linux side of yuzu got some nice improvements too like fixing up the initialization of the Vulkan swapchain on Wayland, making it work better for NVIDIA GPU owners and also a crash with Flatpak was solved too.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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jarhead_h May 13, 2023
[quote=Redhacker2]
Quoting: legluondunetThe gap between today's consoles and working emulators is narrowing. We had never known an emulator that emulates a console still on sale. ......

Emulators don't cost them anything. Anyone who pirates wasn't going to buy the game to begin with for the most part, nor were they going to buy the console.

To play legally, you both require an actual hackable switch's key and your own dumps from a hacked switch.

Also, Nintendo is one of the most anti-consumer companies to exist in the gaming industry right now.

Weeeeelllll....... I bought a Wii-U copy of Breath of the Wild a few years ago because I hadn't bothered to look into how much trouble it was to get a legal copy working with CEMU. I still haven't played it, but I'll get around to it some time probably this year. The sequel looks pretty interesting.

I have a 5900X/RX6800XT CPU/GPU combo with 32GB and a 2TB PCIE4 NVME all to drive a 43in 4K AORUS monitor. I am not going to buy inferior hardware to play a game. ANY GAME. FROM ANYBODY. If I can legally buy a copy and get it running on my hardware, I will gladly do so. Better, if they bring it to our platform and I will gladly buy it there.

For context, I have the entire SEGA Genesis library on Steam, along with all the Konami gems from the 8/16-bit era. I have all the roms and a working emulator. I didn't need to buy any of it, I WANTED TO. Second time buying a lot of it as I owned the cartridges back in the day, and happy to do it both as reward for bringing the software to our platform, as well as to signal Valve that they made the right decision to support Linux and make it possible for game devs to easily distribute to it.

If Nintendo released it's back catalog of games via Steam, I would buy them just as I have the SEGA catalog. But they won't, so I guess I'm stuck with roms.

I happily bought a lot of the Final Fantasy games, especially FFX/FFX2 on Steam for same reason, as well as the much more recent MARVEL'S SPIDERMAN REMASTERED which I never expected Sony to EVER release outside of the Playstation network. But they put it on Steam and it plays beautifully via Steamplay. and I paid full price as a thank you. Glad to do it.

So you see, I have absolutely ZERO problem with buying software, but I already have the hardware that I both need and want. With the way things are now, if something doesn't work on Linux, 9/10 it's because a corporation is standing in the way deliberately, they are spitting on us, which means they don't want my money and as such will not get it. I'd rather pay them for their product, but it's not required.


Last edited by jarhead_h on 13 May 2023 at 6:41 am UTC
jarhead_h May 13, 2023
Quoting: mr-victory
Quoting: Cybolicwhen it became possible to play DVD films on PC DVD drives
Wait, it wasn't possible initially?

If you bought a capable drive with legal software it was. I bought mine at a CompUSA so that I could play the DVD version of Wing Commander IV.

It would be a few years before DVD John cracked the DVD copy protection, which is the reason all the media software these days can play it all.

I used to rip copies of movies off of the DVD specifically to have a copy without the unskippable commercials and stupid menus. Thanks to DVD John.
BladePupper May 13, 2023
Quoting: legluondunetNintendo is an innovative company and produces user-friendly games, switch emulators must be costing them a lot of money.
I'm mostly curious as to how nintendo has innovated in the past decade and even since the release of the switch. Also yes bleem was definitely a thing and its legal precedent is still massively important.
damarrin May 13, 2023
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Quoting: BladePupper
Quoting: legluondunetNintendo is an innovative company and produces user-friendly games, switch emulators must be costing them a lot of money.
I'm mostly curious as to how nintendo has innovated in the past decade and even since the release of the switch. Also yes bleem was definitely a thing and its legal precedent is still massively important.

The Switch was a huge innovation in itself. The Steam Deck is a complete rip off of that, as are all the Aya and other devices. Add to that that they make the best games and they don't need to be innovating any more in the near future.

I agree BTW they're a backwards and customer hostile company, but it's their IP and they can do anything they want with it.


Last edited by damarrin on 13 May 2023 at 7:28 am UTC
jking May 13, 2023
Quoting: legluondunetThe gap between today's consoles and working emulators is narrowing. We had never known an emulator that emulates a console still on sale.

This isn't remotely true, by the way. UltraHLE, Virtual Game Station, PPSSPP, Dolphin (for both GameCube and Wii), VisualBoyAdvance, and PCSX2 all appeared within the lifetime of their systems, for example. Emulators are better sooner nowadays, but that probably has more to do with modern consoles being closer to general-purpose computers.
Smoke39 May 13, 2023
Quoting: poiuzIf we were talking about GPLed software you'd be whining about how immoral this behavior is. It's the copyright's owner privilige to decide how anything is released. This is true for Free & proprietary software.

If you don't like Nintendo, why are you buying stuff from them & support their "anti-consumer" behavior?
The purpose of copyright isn't to protect some "god-given" right to control "intellectual property," it's to incentivize contributing to society by guaranteeing a good faith opportunity to profit from one's work. It's entirely reasonable to question how well copyright achieves this, and to scrutinize how individual owners use their copyright.

Like jarhead was saying, I already have hardware that would be perfectly capable of running their games. If they won't sell me their games without strings attached (buying redundant hardware), then I would argue they aren't really using their copyright in good faith.

If a bunch of hobbyists are able to meet a demand in their spare time, for free, better than a large, wealthy corporation, then the profit motive has failed, and the system should be re-evaluated. In the mean time, it is ethical to resort to alternative means. No one should be able to lay claim to a market they choose not to pursue.

As for the GPL, I have no idea what parallel you're even trying to draw. The entire concept of copyleft is to use copyright against itself to "hack" freedom into a system that would otherwise tend to restrict it, and would be unnecessary if copyright didn't exist in the first place.

And I don't buy stuff from Nintendo, because I think they're doodie-heads.
kit89 May 13, 2023
Quoting: damarrin
Quoting: BladePupper
Quoting: legluondunetNintendo is an innovative company and produces user-friendly games, switch emulators must be costing them a lot of money.
I'm mostly curious as to how nintendo has innovated in the past decade and even since the release of the switch. Also yes bleem was definitely a thing and its legal precedent is still massively important.

The Switch was a huge innovation in itself. The Steam Deck is a complete rip off of that, as are all the Aya and other devices. Add to that that they make the best games and they don't need to be innovating any more in the near future.

I agree BTW they're a backwards and customer hostile company, but it's their IP and they can do anything they want with it.

I am not certain the Switch can be given credit for being innovative here, last I heard the Switch was the hardware from the Nvidia Shield Portable after Shield died on the vine.
Smoke39 May 13, 2023
Quoting: damarrin
Quoting: BladePupper
Quoting: legluondunetNintendo is an innovative company and produces user-friendly games, switch emulators must be costing them a lot of money.
I'm mostly curious as to how nintendo has innovated in the past decade and even since the release of the switch. Also yes bleem was definitely a thing and its legal precedent is still massively important.

The Switch was a huge innovation in itself. The Steam Deck is a complete rip off of that, as are all the Aya and other devices. Add to that that they make the best games and they don't need to be innovating any more in the near future.

I agree BTW they're a backwards and customer hostile company, but it's their IP and they can do anything they want with it.
In what way is the Steam Deck a ripoff of the Switch? It can't be the joycons, because the Deck doesn't have that. It can't be the controls-on-either-side-of-the-screen layout, because that's a long established form factor. It can't be the concept of running "big screen" software on a "small screen" device, because the Nomad already did that for consoles a million years ago, and laptops have been doing that for PC for a long time as well.

Really, handheld gaming has been chasing couch/desk gaming since its inception. It's just that now mobile computing technology has started to catch up. All Nintendo really did was skip the console this gen, and instead enable their handheld to plug into a TV.

Given their dominance in the handheld gaming market, and the fact that they had already gotten out of the console horsepower arms race two generations ago, it was a smart decision, and by all accounts well executed, but I really don't think it was a "huge innovation."
Helmic May 13, 2023
Seems a bit strange that people have to relitigate basic tenets of the FOSS movement in the comment section for playing video games on literally Linux. I can't imagine being so brainwormed by neoliberalism that I would genuinely favor creating needless e-waste during climate collapse and wasting people's limited money during especially tough times just to buy a redundant console that most likely only earns a small margin anyways, for a company that's been getting in trouble for mistreating workers and abusing copyright law and their meassive wealth to assert control and attack FOSS projects. We are here specifically due to an ideological opposition to the concept of intellectual property and are using copyleft licenses as a means to undermine it, proselytizing Linux to further normalize FOSS in people's lives so that they can go about their lives without being exploited by the companies that make hte software that runs on their devices... such as the Switch, which absolutely is using things like telemetry while using its locked down nature to extract more money out of people that they shouldn't *have* to spend. Which, coincidentally, is why I think BSD is a bad license, because that just ended up being free labor to create closed source code for the Switch without really offering any benefits to the actual end users.

If anything, one should have to morally justify playing Nintendo games on a Switch. By default, I think that makes you a bad person and a possible baby eater. Ethical gamers emulate Nintendo games.
Pengling May 13, 2023
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Quoting: kit89last I heard the Switch was the hardware from the Nvidia Shield Portable after Shield died on the vine.
Nintendo officially released a selection of upscaled emulated Wii games on the Nvidia Shield, with the motion-controlled parts remapped to button controls, as well, so they aren't averse to selling their games on other hardware, at this point. This also seems to go against their past claims that their games can only be made/can only work due to their "integrated hardware and software" approach to business.
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