Major Nintendo Switch Emulator Yuzu Update Triples Metroid Prime Remastered FPS On PC

The Nintendo Switch is a handheld game console that uses hardware already a year old when it released back in 2017. Considering all that, it should be trivial to emulate on modern PCs, right? Well... no, actually. Not only is emulation surprisingly difficult in general, but even high-level emulation of the Switch is actually rather complicated because the hardware has various features that simply don't exist in modern PCs.


The most recent progress report for Yuzu Emulator is up on the project's blog, and it describes a dizzying array of fixes, improvements, and optimizations made over the last month. Arguably the most notable of these is the implementation of host texture download acceleration, also known as "Accelerate DMA" support. Implemented by Yuzu developer Blinkhawk, the feature lets the GPU handle texture downloads, tremendously alleviating what was a major bottleneck in some titles.

Also, in changes that are highly-relevant to Metroid Prime Remastered, there were huge revisions to the input system for the emulator in the last month. One of the greatest advantages of playing console games in a PC emulator is that you get your pick of input devices. Naturally, people want to play Metroid Prime Remastered on PC using a keyboard and mouse, like a regular FPS game. This is already possible in the original game using a custom fork of Dolphin, but obviously the classic version doesn't look quite as nice as the new revision.

Those two sets of changes are barely scratching the surface of what the developers accomplished in the past month. Video playback should be smooth even on systems that don't support hardware VP9 decoding now, and games that make use of MSAA now should render correctly in OpenGL. Yoshi's Crafted World and Pokemon Scarlet and Violet should also have major rendering bugs fixed, including a crash bug in the former.

To prevent texture decoding from having too much performance impact on gameplay, the developers implemented a hack that allows the emulator to asynchronously decode ASTC textures. This means that the game can keep going without the necessary texture data until it gets decoded by the CPU. It will result in some objects lacking textures briefly, but it should drastically improve the smoothness of gameplay in certain titles, like Astral Chain and Bayonetta 3.

If you're curious about some of the more technical details of the update, or want to know what else was changed, you can head over to Yuzu's blog to read the full thirty-page progress report.