Play Super Mario and Zelda In Glorious High Res With AMD FSR On Latest Yuzu Emulator

Of course, PC gamers know that there are a plethora of reasons one would prefer to play in an emulator. Beyond obvious things like save-states and speed-running tools, and even beyond less-obvious perks like the myriad control configurations that emulators allow, these hardware-spoofing applications usually give PC gamers the ability to beautify their favorite titles in ways that the original hardware never could.

It probably doesn't even bear mentioning that, even in an emulator, the GPU built into the Nintendo Switch's Tegra SoC needs relatively little horsepower to emulate; almost any recent GeForce or Radeon has more than enough GPU grunt. In fact, this writer has even tested a Ryzen 5 5600G's integrated graphics and found it perfectly serviceable. As such, most PC gamers will likely find that they can crank up the resolution on their favorite Switch game by double or more with no real performance impact.

If you don't have the horsepower for upscaling—or if your game breaks when attempting it—there's another part of Project ART that you can lean on to improve visuals a touch. Besides the native resolution scaling option, the Yuzu team also implemented a few different "window adaptation filters." Essentially, these are scaling algorithms that the emulator can use to scale the image from its native render resolution—usually 1280×720 or 1920×1080—to your window resolution.

All of this is pretty great, so there has to be a catch -- and there is: Project ART is currently only available in Early Access builds of Yuzu, which are only available to the project's Patreon patrons. The good news is that it only costs $5 to join to Yuzu's Early Access program. You can head over to the Yuzu blog post to read about the update and see some nice side-by-side comparisons, or head over to their Patreon to support further Switch emulator development.