With the first quarter of 2021 out of the way, it's time for many to look back on their progress made thus far, and it's no different for the group behind Ryujinx, the Nintendo Switch emulator. The team has neatly detailed their achievements made in the past few months, and the overall progress made on Patreon tier goals. There's an absolute wealth of documentation to go through, as the developers have made numerous changes and improvements, with the most notable summarized below.

The first topic of discussion is Bravely Default II, which released back in February, and in the time between then and now, the game's performance has made an impressive leap, being unplayable on launch, to being in nearly perfect playable status as of now. A handful of promised features have also been added recently, from amiibo emulation--which is just about finished and nearly fully compatible--to adding a Vulkan GPU backend for private testers and set to be extended to the public sometime in April, and reaching a new patron goal of over $1,500 a month, which means the addition of ARB Shaders and better performance on Nvidia graphics cards is achievable.

Amiibo Emulation - merged into the main build on 3/18/21.
While compatibility is now almost perfect, there are still some improvements to come for Amiibo which can be tracked on the associated Github issue here: https://github.com/Ryujinx/Ryujinx/issues/2122

Custom User Profiles - in progress. Some prerequisites have been established; there should be big news on this soon!

Vulkan GPU Backend - in progress, ETA April 2021 for public testing. See further below for a more in-depth report on the progress of this feature.

$1500/month - ARB Shaders - Almost there!

ARB shaders will further reduce stuttering on first-run by improving the shader compilation speed on NVIDIA GPUs using the OpenGL API.

$2500/month - One full-time developer - Not yet met

This amount of monthly donations will allow the project's founder, gdkchan, to work full-time on developing Ryujinx.

Another important milestone is the introduction of the emulator's LDN 2.2 update. This is a specific build of Ryujinx that allows for online multiplayer, with version 2.2 adding in tons of performance boosts and stability, for games like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and more, as well as support for Monster Hunter Rise.

- LDN2.2 is up-to-date as of master 1.0.6819
- Graphical fixes for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.
- Texture swap fixes on Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate.
- Stability improvements in Super Smash Bros. ultimate.
- Missing menu text fixed in Splatoon 2.
- Logic bug fixed in Super Bomberman R.
- Color accuracy improvements on Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Splatoon 2, and others.
The following PRs were added into LDN2.2:
- Add support for HLE macros and accelerate MultiOrawElementsIndirectCount.
- PPTC meets ExeFS Patching.
- Performance tweaks for Pokemon Sword & Shield and Monster Hunter Rise are included.

With all this progress, it looks like Ryujinx is better than never before. If you're interested in the full changelog of additions and changes--be forewarned, it's a veritable novel--you can check it out in the source below, or you can grab the latest build of the emulator, also available on their official site.

Source
Download

 

[raxadian]

This is true. It's generally better for people to try out both and see which one runs better though. Hardware differences make a huge difference with Switch emulation.

For what I have seen, Yuzu is slighty slower but on games that work great in both emulators that's basically it.

 

[bowlofspiders]

For what I have seen, Yuzu is slighty slower but on games that work great in both emulators that's basically it.

It's the opposite. Yuzu is much much faster than Ryujinx. It has been ever since yuzu added multicore support. Ryujinx was faster before yuzu got multicore.

 

[hamohamo]

Yuzu is written in C++, Ryujinx is written in C#.
Other things is both teams have different views on what's important and what's not.
Mixing both teams into one team would be a mess because of that.

i know they're written in different languages. what i was saying is that it would've maybe been even better if they started working together since the start. maybe not. either way ryujinx and yuzu are both amazing and impressive projects.

 

[D34DL1N3R]

What really, that's good news. So it's only with Yuzu you need jailbreak Switch?

Neither.

 

[ZeroFX]

The best switch emulator, nice team, lle-ish, progress going nice, nice team.

 

[Deleted member 194275]

today I learned that sxos vs Atmosphere is not the only source of enraged posts on Switch scene...

 

[thekarter104]

In yuzu right click Animal Crossing and hit "Open Save Data Location."
Now in Ryujinx right click Animal Crossing and hit "Open User Save Directory."
Just move all of the files from the yuzu window that opened to the Ryujinx window that opened.

Open user save directory is greyed out! So I can't. What to do now?

 

[raxadian]

It's the opposite. Yuzu is much much faster than Ryujinx. It has been ever since yuzu added multicore support. Ryujinx was faster before yuzu got multicore.

A video comparison from just a month ago begs to differ, at least with some games.

 

[bowlofspiders]

A video comparison from just a month ago begs to differ, at least with some games.

That's why I said to try it out on both and see which performs better yourself. In general yuzu is much faster but some games run better (or at all) on Ryujinx like MH Rise. This also depends on your hardware because if you're on older stuff the performance difference between the two gets much larger.

Another aspect to performance is just being able to play the games well on the first go. Ryujinx feels awful while it builds caches because it takes so long. Yuzu doesn't have this issue.

 

[thekarter104]

That's why I said to try it out on both and see which performs better yourself. In general yuzu is much faster but some games run better (or at all) on Ryujinx like MH Rise. This also depends on your hardware because if you're on older stuff the performance difference between the two gets much larger.

Another aspect to performance is just being able to play the games well on the first go. Ryujinx feels awful while it builds caches because it takes so long. Yuzu doesn't have this issue.

Yes, ofcourse it also depends on the hardware. I7 3770k GTX 660Ti.
Animal Crossing lags much on Yuzu.
Will it perform better on Ryujinx?

EDIT: Finally figured it out with the saves.
Animal Crossing runs way slower than on Yuzu.

 

[64bitmodels]

RyujiNX is the SNES9X to Yuzu's ZSNES.

that's implying yuzu is shit though

 

[Silent_Gunner]

that's implying yuzu is shit though

SNES9X is more accurate, while ZSNES is inaccurate, but for a time, it was the best we had. Hell, some things (romhacks, anyone?) are still dependent on the latter.

 

[Topaz95]

I still can't believe we already have a Nintendo switch emulator in this day and age. Let alone two of them.

 

[raxadian]

I still can't believe we already have a Nintendo switch emulator in this day and age. Let alone two of them.

And meanwhile while the Xbox is gonna be 20 years old, emulation of it is still not really good.

 

[Deleted User]

And meanwhile while the Xbox is gonna be 20 years old, emulation of it is still not really good.

It's not on some other consoles level yet, but it's gotten better in 2021. If you look here about half the games work now, and there's another emulator, cxbx where some other games work.

https://xemu.app/

 

[MarkDarkness]

RyujiNX is the SNES9X to Yuzu's ZSNES.

Oldschool. <3

 

[raxadian]

It's not on some other consoles level yet, but it's gotten better in 2021. If you look here about half the games work now, and there's another emulator, cxbx where some other games work.

https://xemu.app/

Hopefully you know who will finally get SOUND.

Then again the Saturn is even older and the emulation is crap.

 

[Deleted User]

Hopefully you know who will finally get SOUND.

Then again the Saturn is even older and the emulation is crap.

I don't know who you mean needs sound, honestly. Just say it. You mean Xbox? It has sound.

If you know what you're doing, Saturn emulation isn't bad either. SSF with scripts is pretty good, but most people have no idea how to use it. All of the big exclusives for Saturn play fine on it, and if it's not exclusive just get it somewhere else.

 

[raxadian]

I don't know who you mean needs sound, honestly. Just say it. You mean Xbox? It has sound.

Only two Xbox emulators are still being maintained, one of them lacks sound.

And none of the two can run Pyschonauts well.

 

[Deleted User]

Only two Xbox emulators are still being maintained, one of them lacks sound.

And none of the two can run Pyschonauts well.

You have no idea what you're talking about, Xemu has sound, cxbx has sound. I have a bunch of games for both. You're probably using info from like 2017 and think it's still accurate.

Ok none of them can run Psychonauts well, that's one game and no one said Xbox emulation is perfect.

I can tell you know very little about xbox emulation in 2021, just going off assumptions. Why don't you, I don't know, try it, see if it has sound and if games work and report back and don't just write both emulators off because they don't play one game.

If you approached it like "I haven't been keeping up with Xbox emulation lately, last I knew it sucked" that's fine, but stop assuming things that are wrong and saying them as fact. Things change. Just look at the compatibility list I posted half the games work for xemu and yes it has sound, I just played a few racing games like an hour ago and play it all the time.

xemu.app

But I'll say this xemu is not that easy to get started on until you know what you're doing because you need ISOs not folder format and you can't use redumped ISOs, so you have to convert the ISOs yourself with Qwix or XDVDMulleter. But once you figure out how to convert one game it's easy. I like learning new things especially when it comes to emulation and don't give up easily.