The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is finally smooth on PC using Nintendo Switch emulators during both gameplay and cut-scenes.
“Finally” feels pretty damn quick when it wasn’t long ago coders were still finishing off SNES games.
Total tangent: But I feel Apple‘s transition from PPC to i86 has been much more rocky than from i86 to ARM, primarily thanks to Rosetta, which is essentially „hardware accelerated emulation“. I feel like emulation has come a long way in the past few years. Xenia is doing great stuff for Xbox and Yuzu ist really great. Good times ahead I feel.
I feel like emulation has come a long way in the past few years.
Honestly me too. I completely dropped out of playing games on emulators for awhile (various reasons, life stuff, you know how it is, just had less time for video games in general). Been getting back into it lately and it’s refreshingly amazing how well everything works.
I played it in 4k 60fps in PC a few days before release. It had some bugs then, like missing icons, rare shader stutter and shader bugs. All negligible enough, so for me personally on my system, the game was absolutely playable in a healthy state, before it officially released on Switch, in better quality.
Now again, this might not have been the case for everyone who tried, nor if you didn’t have the latest mods from the community. But as some people, not you, said this wasn’t possible, was nothing but coping. You also didn’t need to be a technical expert, other than downloading mods and put them in the mods folder manually and changing a few settings inside the emulator, which you could copy past from someone else.
I have a launch switch and a PC. I’ve mostly played on PC, and also recently got a steam deck, so add that to the mix. The SD isn’t much better than a switch, especially with the translation errors of emulation, but it’s still better and a better screen for sure. PC is no contest better. CPU is the bottleneck on performance for the game, so while I have a Ryzen 7, Yuzu barely uses it, at most 30% utilization. My 3060ti is running at almost max, but it’s also doing a solid 1440p60 with very little errors. What little graphical inconsistencies there are are massive outweighed by the better resolution, and higher framerate.
a Ryzen 7, Yuzu barely uses it, at most 30% utilization
With emulation, that’s usually an indication that not all cores are utilized. The most faithful emulation is to use as many cores for the CPU as the original system has. From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch#Technical_specifications
While the SoC features 8 CPU cores, the Switch only uses the 4 64-bit Cortex-A57 cores, of which 1 is reserved to the operating system
As you can see, only 3 cores are actively used by the game under high pressure. The one system core is probably (just probably!) light on resources to emulate. I don’t know how many cores your system has, but this should be an indication why only 30% of your CPU is utilized to emulate the game.
Oh sure, but it’s also by design of the emulator and based on the machine it’s emulating. my point is that while I have a BIS CPU for AM4 gaming, it’s not what is making the game run well and it could continue to run well on a much more modest CPU.
What do you prefer about the Steam Deck’s screen over the Switch? They should be the same (horizontal) resolution and I’ve heard that the color on the steam deck isn’t that good.
You can fix the color with software mods, 60hz refresh is better, the resolution is a bit higher (though if you’re emulating a switch game, you’re going to run it at the switch resolution, and it’s a bigger screen than the launch switch I have. The OLED might be a different topic
Emulation is a beautiful thing. Especially with that game. Wish the switch had more power but my PC does the trick!
*with a 13900k and a 4090
That’s what the player is running the game with
I have a 3060 ti and Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which, while a good CPU, doesn’t matter because the performance of the game itself is bottlenecked for CPU usage. 1440p60 constant. I paid less than $400 for the GPU from EVGA’s B-stock.
I find it hard to believe that you are getting 60 fps everywhere. On my 7800x3d I get substantial drops below 60 in certain areas such as lookout landing or hateno village.
It’s the age old discussion on how sensitive people are to those issues. Not saying it’s a bad thing but for some people, if the game runs 99,9% of the time on 4k 60fps, that’s enough. Than you have people who find an area or two that has performance dips, down to sub 30fps for a second and then they call the whole game unplayable and sub 30fps.
I don’t think there’s a right answers to this but it explains the repeating confusing, of people making those claims. I finished TOTK on yuzu emulator and there was only one dungeon I remember with abysmal performance and it was the one where you drive around a vehicle inside a big arena. It probably runs like shit on original Switch too and I see it less of a fault of the emulator and more of the games engine.
Yes, but does the game actually work properly? I was considering playing BotW but it seems you can’t run at 60+ fps without the physics changing and e.g. climbing speed changing. I just can’t stand 30 fps, at all. I have issues with 60 in many games too.
That was fixed weeks ago. I’ve been running it at 1440p60 without any issues. Like legit way better that a switch.
That’s awesome! BotW is still not fixed according to the Cemu wiki, and my understanding is Cemu is the one that works best for that particular game.
Might actually get this then.
I’d recommend running the Switch version of BotW on Ryujinx or Yuzu instead of the WiiU version on Cemu.