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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[ZeroFX]

Nice, this emulator has more potencial than that unorganized mess with shady devs called yuzu.

 

[Joom]

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.

It's super easy. Just download Rufus, acquire a 4+ GB USB drive, and grab Ubuntu or one of its many forks. Installing pretty much just involves creating an account and clicking "Next" a bunch. I personally recommend Pop_OS! since you have an AMD machine. I get the most out of my MBP with it, and I can probably safely assume you have better hardware than I do. I haven't tried one of the Switch emulators yet since I have a Switch, so I can't speak for their performance, but gaming in general has been perfectly fine.

 

[Xzi]

Ooh ooh, can it play Astral Chain at 60 FPS now? I need that in my life, along with 60 FPS Bloodborne.

 

[Mama Looigi]

Ooh ooh, can it play Astral Chain at 60 FPS now? I need that in my life, along with 60 FPS Bloodborne.

It’s usually full speed on Yuzu on high end systems...
But it cutscenes the audio always desyncs and there’s no fix

 

[Xzi]

It’s usually full speed on Yuzu on high end systems...
But it cutscenes the audio always desyncs and there’s no fix

Yeah it's locked at 30 FPS, right? Hopefully emulation can get around that at some point, or the game just gets ported to PC.

 

[Risingdawn]

Can't wait to try this out on the OneXplayer!

 

[Joom]

60 FPS Bloodborne

Next month. My body is ready.

 

[Xzi]

Next month. My body is ready.

Gods I really hope you're right.

 

[Costello]

great, now I can finally play Skyrim ! maybe

 

[Mama Looigi]

great, now I can finally play Skyrim ! maybe

I think the more important thing here is...
We’re closer to emulating the NES online’s one and only Solomon’s Key on PC!

 

[Deleted User]

Is it simple to import saves from Switch to Ryujinx? I know it is in Yuzu haven't used Ryujinx much.

 

[Jayro]

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 would think that CPU would bottleneck that card, but I wish you the best of luck.

 

[Mama Looigi]

Is it simple to import saves from Switch to Ryujinx? I know it is in Yuzu haven't used Ryujinx much.

Well you can transfer Yuzu saves directly to Ryujinx, so I wouldn’t imagine it’d be much different

 

[Deleted User]

Nice, this emulator has more potencial than that unorganized mess with shady devs called yuzu.

a real shame that yuzu gets the most patreon support compared to rujinx.

 

[SaulFabre]

Amazing! Looks like Ryujinx is getting better than Yuzu (Switch emulator from Citra 3DS Emulator creators)

 

[kid sampson]

It's super easy. Just download Rufus, acquire a 4+ GB USB drive, and grab Ubuntu or one of its many forks. Installing pretty much just involves creating an account and clicking "Next" a bunch. I personally recommend Pop_OS! since you have an AMD machine. I get the most out of my MBP with it, and I can probably safely assume you have better hardware than I do. I haven't tried one of the Switch emulators yet since I have a Switch, so I can't speak for their performance, but gaming in general has been perfectly fine.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!

 

[Joom]

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!

No problem. As an added bonus, if you have an Intel CPU, check out the Xanmod kernel. It has pstate and fsync support, which are both greatly beneficial to gaming. It's also just an all-around-good kernel, so I recommend it regardless.

 

[impeeza]

Is it simple to import saves from Switch to Ryujinx? I know it is in Yuzu haven't used Ryujinx much.

Yes you only need to use a save game exporter on switch JKSV or Checkpoint do it

 

[RedBlueGreen]

Let me know when Deadly Premonition 2 is actually playable (of course that probably means inaccurate emulation). Hard to tolerate the 20 fps on Switch.

 

[Deleted User]

Let me know when Deadly Premonition 2 is actually playable (of course that probably means inaccurate emulation). Hard to tolerate the 20 fps on Switch.

afaik it gets ported to PC soon.