The days of playing 3DS games on the Steam Deck came true with Citra, and if there are games you have found performance issues with, you may want to check them again! The Canary branch just got a new update today that will increase performance across the board by 20% - 30% on Linux devices, which includes the Steam Deck.

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Tipped off by a post on X by Mr. Sujano, and then followed up to confirm on the Citra discord, the newest update to the Canary branch (2658) brings one change:

  • - Switch compiler to clang on Linux
CitraCanaryVersionDiscord

This change specifically helps Linux devices and brings some wonderful performance improvements. I tested the opening of Ocarina of Time 3D at 9x Native Resolution myself on both the Nightly 2015 and Canary 2661 versions of Citra, and it was able to stick to 30 FPS way more in the Canary version than the Nightly.

The Canary branch is similar to the Nightly build, and it is updated quite frequently but generally has more performance improvements than the Nightly.

Unfortunately, using the Flatpak version of Citra automatically downloads the Nightly version, and EmuDeck does the same. These improvements could come to the Nightly soon, but if you don't want to wait, you can download the newest Canary version on Citra's website. Make sure it is the version at the top, any past this version number will have the improvements, and you click on the Linux penguin:

CitraCanaryDownload

Once that's done, extract the folder and open the citra-qt.appimage to start it up!

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Noah Kupetsky
A lover of gaming since 4, Noah has grown up with a love and passion for the industry. From there, he started to travel a lot and develop a joy for handheld and PC gaming. When the Steam Deck released, it just all clicked.
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