Ryujinx has been successfully emulating Nintendo Switch games for a while now, but the latest update to the emulator marks a major milestone in terms of performance improvements across the board. The dev team has implemented their new POWER (Performance Optimizations With Extensive Ramifications) upgrade into the main build of Ryujinx. This change, put simply, optimizes the load being put onto a user's CPU and allows for lots of games to run at full-speed, including those on lower-end hardware.

For much of recent memory Ryujinx has been widely known as a highly compatible, feature-rich emulator with one caveat: without a high-end PC, many first-party games simply ran too slowly to be considered playable. We aim to change all that with today's major overhaul of the emulator's memory management, (absurdly but affectionately) nicknamed POWER - Performance Optimizations With Extensive Ramifications. Lowering CPU requirements and increasing headroom for higher end PCs, this update effectively unlocks full-speed gameplay for a vastly larger audience. Thanks to the joint efforts of gdkchan and riperiperi, users with all kinds of hardware can enjoy performance increases anywhere from 20%-100% and beyond, depending on the game and the user's PC specifications.

In performance tests done by the developers, you can see games that previously had issues running at stable framerates before, like Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, now emulate at faster speeds thanks to the POWER update. Ryujinx's team also measured how the POWER build runs on all sorts of hardware, ranging from a high-end Ryzen 7 machine, to a low-spec laptop with onboard graphics. Certain games benefited from increases of over 30fps more than before, as well as dramatically faster boot times.

The LDN netplay feature also saw some improvements, too, adding in some performance tweaks for Monster Hunter Rise and Pokemon Sword & Shield, while also benefitting from the POWER update, as it allows more stable emulation, and therefore more stable connections for players. Anyone interested in checking out the new build can go download it from the official Ryujinx website.

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[gusch]

impressive!

 

[slimbizzy]

cool, i might be able to play pokemon sword and shield now!

 

[Scarlet]

Oh I'm excited to try this on the Win 3!

 

[SnakeOil992]

Which is better now? Yuzu or Ryujinx?

 

[hamohamo]

cool, i might be able to play pokemon sword and shield now!

You could play it on yuzu for more than a year now.

 

[lordelan]

Which is better now? Yuzu or Ryujinx?

As far as I can tell it depends on hardware used and especially which games you play. Some work better on Yuzu, some better on Ryujinx.
However reading news like this is always a great thing.

 

[RupeeClock]

Sounds like an excellent reason for me to learn how to dump my Switch games library, I'm curious to see how well they'll run on an i5 4690K and RTX 3070.

 

[Deleted User]

I had all these emulators with roms on my hacked Switch with forwarders that show them on the main menu and maybe 60 real games on it totallng around 450 games and then I bought a gaming PC, and as time goes in my Switch is less and less relevant especially since the forwarders I already made (took forever) don't work on firmware 12 so I moved all roms to PC, and I've moved most games to PC, and I've considered even putting some of the exclusives on PC with emulation. I went from all those games on my Switch to now only 24. But I also started using Chiaki (streams PS4 to Switch) and Switch-Remoteplay (streams PC to Switch) so there's still a use for it with those. And not to mention I can't sell it just because of Metroid Prime 4 and BOTW 2 still coming eventually. I could but I won't.

 

[MasterJ360]

Yuzu had cutscene glitches or black screens, so if you were playing a game for story it was a no go. I guess I'll see what Ryujinx can do now since performance was it only major issue.

 

[Mama Looigi]

cool, i might be able to play pokemon sword and shield now!

If you’re on an AMD GPU, your only real option is to install Linux and use Yuzu with Linux’s OpenGL drivers. If you have Nvidia... it’s worked perfectly on Windows’ version of Yuzu for months

Sounds like an excellent reason for me to learn how to dump my Switch games library, I'm curious to see how well they'll run on an i5 4690K and RTX 3070.

I have similar specs- you’ll have amazing performance on both Yuzu and Ryujinx

Which is better now? Yuzu or Ryujinx?

As far as I can tell it depends on hardware used and especially which games you play. Some work better on Yuzu, some better on Ryujinx.
However reading news like this is always a great thing.

It is mostly game dependent at this point-
Though for some reason, Ryujinx 70% of the time can boot games at launch that Yuzu can’t.
Some other examples: Ryujinx is far better for Age of Calamity performance-wise, and Ryujinx can play Monster Hunter Rise start to finish, while on Yuzu it won’t even boot

Yuzu had cutscene glitches or black screens, so if you were playing a game for story it was a no go. I guess I'll see what Ryujinx can do now since performance was it only major issue.

Yuzu added video playback support months ago. It’s somewhere in the graphics settings- and it works great

 

[MasterJ360]

Yuzu added video playback support months ago. It’s somewhere in the graphics settings- and it works great

They did add video playback but it still has issues that Ryu succeeds in.

 

[Deleted member 194275]

we still need to dump or own keys, right?

Or there are some available in places that we are not allowed to talk about here?

 

[Mama Looigi]

we still need to dump or own keys, right?

Or there are some available in places that we are not allowed to talk about here?

The latter.
Keys will be required likely for all future consoles with emulation.

 

[Wolfy]

Dang, honestly now I'm wondering if I should hop on the Ryujinx train now that performance has gotten so much better. Performance was the only reason I was running Yuzu in the first place, but I would like the accuracy that comes with Ryujinx. Only problem is, I don't really know much about it, I don't think it'd be too hard to update from my old version when I needed it for event updates with AC:NH.

 

[leapingliger]

Hopefully it gets as optimized as CEMU. I’ve been so spoiled playing BOTW on that emulator, it will be hard to go back to 30 FPS on the switch once BOTW 2 comes out.

 

[BETA215]

Downloaded latest version and had no improvements over older ones. Not a single FPS increase - went from 5 FPS on Mario Odyssey to 5FPS. Bruh.

 

[Mama Looigi]

Downloaded latest version and had no improvements over older ones. Not a single FPS increase - went from 5 FPS on Mario Odyssey to 5FPS. Bruh.

5FPS... well if it was already using your entire CPU, this update wouldn’t exactly change anything

 

[kid sampson]

If you’re on an AMD GPU, your only real option is to install Linux and use Yuzu with Linux’s OpenGL drivers. If you have Nvidia... it’s worked perfectly on Windows’ version of Yuzu for months



I have similar specs- you’ll have amazing performance on both Yuzu and Ryujinx





It is mostly game dependent at this point-
Though for some reason, Ryujinx 70% of the time can boot games at launch that Yuzu can’t.
Some other examples: Ryujinx is far better for Age of Calamity performance-wise, and Ryujinx can play Monster Hunter Rise start to finish, while on Yuzu it won’t even boot



Yuzu added video playback support months ago. It’s somewhere in the graphics settings- and it works great

I've got to find a guide and time to install Linux because I've had lackluster performance on my AMD machine with both emulators.

 

[Mama Looigi]

I've got to find a guide and time to install Linux because I've had lackluster performance on my AMD machine with both emulators.