Citra, the popular Nintendo 3DS emulator has been updated with support for the Vulkan graphics API.

The introduction of Vulkan support for Citra not only modernises the popular emulator that was previously built around the ageing OpenGL standard but can even boost performance for some users, especially those on Android devices. It also means that Apple Silicon devices are now supported.

As of now, feature parity and emulator compatiblity is not on par with the previous OpenGL releases due to the ongoing implementation of Vulkan but work is underway and the devs are encouraging users to report any issues they encounter.

Vulkan support can be found in the latest nightly Citra release.

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[PopcornSweetie]

Huge W for the emulation scene/community

 

[Plazorn]

Yes! Now I can play 3DS games portably on my phone!

 

[Deleted member 506312]

Massive W, congrats to the Citra team for getting Vulkan working.

Yes! Now I can play 3DS games portably on my phone!

Finally, we can play our 3DS games on the go!!

...wait.

 

[AndorfRequissa]

Huge W for the emulation scene/community

its amazing what enhancements vulkan can do for games that were designed for small pixel handhelds now being emulated on big screen TVs. ive always preferred TV gaming to handheld games and am glad we are past the era where some of the coolest games were playable on heldhelds only.

 

[Bodhi-Baum]

Do one need some special hard- or software for this when using it on a Linux maschine?

 

[Coto]

Just passing by to say:

OpenGL is more of a standard to draw raw graphics into a fixed pipeline, so it's obvious newer GPUs like the PICA200 will bottleneck as a matter of "fitting-rebuilding caches-executing them into display lists".

But to call OpenGL deprecated is blatant ignorance, it's meant for general purposes graphics. And then the entire fault on the developers side of OpenGL driver development.

Vulkan takes a DirectX approach-like and hence, allows to repurpose better the first paragraph, and scales better to emulated GPUs featuring shaders of some sort.

 

[Deleted member 194275]

Citra is amazing, but it's not tailored at all for slower machines. Maybe with this API things start get going.

 

[gaga941021]

View attachment 394208​

Citra, the popular Nintendo 3DS emulator has been updated with support for the Vulkan graphics API.

The introduction of Vulkan support for Citra not only modernises the popular emulator that was previously built around the ageing OpenGL standard but can even boost performance for some users, especially those on Android devices. It also means that Apple Silicone devices are now supported.

As of now, feature parity and emulator compatiblity is not on par with the previous OpenGL releases due to the ongoing implementation of Vulkan but work is underway and the devs are encouraging users to report any issues they encounter.

Vulkan support can be found in the latest nightly Citra release.

1702812371650335163​

Source

Nevermind. Cant read.

 

[Deleted member 672055]

honestly now that I got the actual hardware they can go screw itself LOL, taking the support off the emulator in its canary builds was uncalled for IMO

 

[shaunj66]

Just passing by to say:

OpenGL is more of a standard to draw raw graphics into a fixed pipeline, so it's obvious newer GPUs like the PICA200 will bottleneck as a matter of "fitting-rebuilding caches-executing them into display lists".

But to call OpenGL deprecated is blatant ignorance, it's meant for general purposes graphics. And then the entire fault on the developers side of OpenGL driver development.

Vulkan takes a DirectX approach-like and hence, allows to repurpose better the first paragraph, and scales better to emulated GPUs featuring shaders of some sort.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us. I'm just echoing the teams statements in their announcement of the update however.

 

[MarkDarkness]

Beautiful.

Post automatically merged: Sep 16, 2023

Just passing by to say:

OpenGL is more of a standard to draw raw graphics into a fixed pipeline, so it's obvious newer GPUs like the PICA200 will bottleneck as a matter of "fitting-rebuilding caches-executing them into display lists".

But to call OpenGL deprecated is blatant ignorance, it's meant for general purposes graphics. And then the entire fault on the developers side of OpenGL driver development.

Vulkan takes a DirectX approach-like and hence, allows to repurpose better the first paragraph, and scales better to emulated GPUs featuring shaders of some sort.

Well, as you yourself said, OpenGL is not ideal for contemporary emulators; its premises are ancient. Vulkan is an objectively better solution for our purposes, although OpenGL remains perfectly viable and great for legacy support.

 

[ZDA]

Glad to see this, I saw that Panda3DS is also working on / has a Vulkan renderer

 

[HellaJvke]

big win would love to see future ability to emulate on an XR device with full 3D and simulated touch screen

 

[Coto]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us. I'm just echoing the teams statements in their announcement of the update however.

Yes. I meant that message towards devs who made these comments. You've done a great work in this community overall.

 

[brunocar]

I wonder how it'll perform in my Pixel 6a now, it wasnt great last time i checked.

 

[RichardTheKing]

Now, if only plugins were supported...there were a few great plugins made over time, especially for the Pokemon games.
I haven't found any other source for, say, Ultra Sun/Moon walk through walls or infinite Z-Moves or Mega Evolutions or anything - no cheat codes for that, only a plugin.

 

[chrisrlink]

can't wait for a boost for gen 6/7 pokemon games i heard they run like crap currently even on steamdeck

 

[Latiodile]

is gas mode still broken or is monster hunter stories still unplayably blurry?

before you mention "disable 3d cheat", that doesn't fix this issue

 

[TheStonedModder]

I wonder if this will increase performance on my AMD laptop. I struggles to run Citra as a whole currently (despite that Pokémon doesn’t have great performance according to their docs) it’s a slideshow