Emulator Updates Roundup: February 2023

Another month has passed and we got some fantastic updates to some of our favorite emulators. While some emulators got some minor updates to their nightly builds, which we won't necessarily cover since they are usually smaller updates almost daily, we have some big ones that we can't wait to share!

Don't have any emulators but curious on how to get them? Check out our EmuDeck Guide where we go over the best way to install and auto-configure all of these emulators and more.

Dolphin (Gamecube/Wii)

Starting off strong here, we have the notorious Gamecube/Wii emulator, Dolphin!

The biggest update that will effect the Steam Deck directly will have to be allowing Dolphin to manually cull vertices. It was noticed that in some games, like Metroid Prime and Twilight Princess, have an odd way of drawing maps, which forces Dolphin to use a large number of draw calls to emulate what the games are doing. So, to combat this, TellowKrinkle created a way for Dolphin to detect this and actually reduce the draw calls significantly, which can heavily increase performance in some games:

While this won't apply to all games, like Super Mario Galaxy, it is possible we could see some sizable improvements in popular games like the Metroid Prime series or Twilight Princess. The emulator defaults to the option being off for most games, but some that have been tested specifically have it enabled.

A new option was also added to Force Nearest or Linear Texture Filtering. This can fix some games that have some visible texture defects when running at higher resolutions. For example, forcing Linear Texture Filtering on Skyward Sword running at higher than native resolutions will fix the chunky shading, which is particularly visible on Link.

One of the other biggest changes in the last month or two was the addition of VBI (Vertical Blanking Interval) Skip. This helps most games be much more playable when it isn't running at full speed. This generally will help underpowered devices more than the powerful ones, but it is notable as it can help significantly with playability and the audio playback.

There were also a couple of other additions like implementing AccurateNaNs, emulating PPC Datacache (for more expensive devices that want CTGP Revolution), and even implementing an emulated Skylanders Portal of Power, which will allow you to emulate putting a figurine into the game.

Yuzu (Switch)

The biggest change here that will affect the Deck's performance is the improvements made when using Vulkan. Instead of relying on the GPU driver to store and validate the shaders, it was stored in a custom file in Yuzu's folders, allowing AMD GPUs to load large caches in seconds. It was also much quicker to save due to fewer checks being performed and a reduction in stutters when facing new shaders. This option is enabled by default due to it being considered fully stable.

On top of the Vulkan optimizations, support for Geometry Shader Passthrough Emulation was also added, which fixes rendering issues that could be seen in a multitude of games like Pokemon: Legends Arceus and NieR: Automata The End of YoRHa Edition. Geometry Shader Passthrough is an Nvidia-exclusive feature, so emulating this helps significantly. The Draw Texture Method that is also an Nvidia-exclusive feature was implemented as well, which fixes rendering of other games like Titan Quest.

There was also a significant performance improvement that was implemented for Pokemon games, which allows them to render faster, but lower accuracy. For those playing Pokemon Scarlet/Violet, this could be a big benefit to you! Fire Emblem: Engage (FE:E) had a round of fixes as well to make it much more playable.

Support for FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) was also added to the OpenGL backend and can improve filter quality compared to other options! There are also additional resolution options for resolution scaling, but be warned, AMD doesn't support big textures, so there could be a limit in some games.

There was also implementation of a "Turbo Mode", which really is just a way to boost performance with AMD GPUs by constantly feeding it with work so the clock speeds stay higher. While this can heavily help with some games, it will increase power consumption and can hit limits relatively easily. The Yuzu devs directly mention the Steam Deck being more optional due to a set battery life, so it isn't enabled by default. Be warned if you decide to use this that portable play will be cut short!

Ryujinx (Switch)

A fix was released to make resolution scaling work correctly for multiple different games due to MSAA textures being un-blacklisted from the scaling algorithm. This will directly affect titles like Rune Factory 5, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, and Fire Emblem: Engage. This will also remove fuzzy edges caused by some game's aggressive blur filters.

The team also implemented a short duration texture cache, which should help performance in Koei Tecmo's Age of Calamity and Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Any games that have slowdowns thanks to texture creation should see the most benefit from this.

Just look at the framerate gains after the fix, going from 9 FPS to 30!

They also made sure old swapchains are now manually destroyed when a new one is created, as well as forcing a deletion whenever a texture is unmapped. Both of these will heavily reduce VRAM usage, which we need as much as we can get on the Deck.

There were also some other fixes for games like Persona 4 Golden and optimizing for MacOS and ARM64 processors, which will slightly improve performance.

Xenia (Xbox 360)

Recently, Xenia added some new post-processing effects! This includes FSR and FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS), as well as FXAA and Dithering. Combining FXAA and FSR or CAS will result in some sharper upscaled images that can also improve jagged edges of the images.

The update also added support for Variable Refresh Rate on displays that support FreeSync, G-Sync, and VESA Adaptive-sync. While this doesn't directly benefit the Deck, it can benefit monitors you may be outputting to.

PCSX2 (PS2)

PCSX2 had a bunch of improvements that came recently, but the biggest one is the addition of the Vulkan renderer for smoother and more efficient gameplay on AMD GPUs. This new addition, that they have named "Vulkanic" can handle high blending loads and is more efficient than Direct3D and OpenGL. AMD graphics cards will have a less punishing time trying to run games, which should increase performance on the Steam Deck.

The team has also added a hash-based texture cache and texture replacement feature. The hash-based cache will give games that have lots of texture streams and uploads a HUGE performance boost, like GTA San Andreas or Liberty City Stories. The texture replacement feature gives users the ability to dump and replace textures, which give a whole new range of customization to your experience. There is also Asynchronous texture dumping and loading for improved performance and supports pre-loading textures to memory for faster loading during gameplay!

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RPCS3 (PS3)

Not a huge update, but there was a bug fixed that caused inconsistent frametimes in MGS4 and one that fixes graphical corruption in some games like GTA V. The fixes were achieved by improving surface and texture cache communication!

Citra (3DS)

While there wasn't really an update, there was a tweet about someone using Citra to play Mario Kart 7 online with other 3DS users that are using the actual console. From what I can tell, it isn't available yet as it still needs to be polished, but you will need a real 3DS to dump your account data. This also carries a small ban risk, but it seems Nintendo has stopped banning consoles. Still, a word of warning if you will be utilizing this yourself!

And that's it from the past month! We will be back next month checking up on the updates coming to all the emulators that are available on the Steam Deck.

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