Emulator Updates Roundup: January 2023

Recently, we saw a couple tweets pop up on Twitter regarding some emulator updates to Yuzu that help the Steam Deck in some way. After seeing both of these, we decided to take a deeper look into all of them to see what has been updated most recently!

We will be prioritizing information that pertains to the Steam Deck, but we will link to each update report so you can see a full run-down if preferred. This also won't include every emulator, prioritizing ones that have updates or interesting news that could pertain to the Deck.

Don't have any emulators but curious 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)

Possibly the biggest emulator update that specifically helps the Steam Deck is Dolphin. Vulkan, a 3D graphics API, is widely used on Linux systems and has seen a multitude of improvements from the December updates, which includes using VMA (Vulkan Memory Allocator) for more efficient memory management.

The biggest change that relates to the Steam Deck directly is optimizing of cache vertex sizes. The function GetVertexSize was found to be using a lot of CPU time, when it only should have come up once, and optimizing it showed some impressive results! The main testing was done with Super Mario Galaxy, which was showing 30% performance boosts on their simulated Steam Deck device:

The optimization is reported to be helpful to most games, but not to the same extent as Super Mario Galaxy. Most will see an increase of 5% -10%, which is still something.

Yuzu (Switch)

Yuzu got a multitude of updates that are helping overall with performance and visuals. Reworked MacroHLE and MacroJIT implementation through YFC 1.5 has reduced CPU overhead and improved performance in a lot of titles including Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, Bayonetta 3, and Monster Hunter: Rise with a 5%-20% performance improvement, with possibly more from CPUs with a lot of cache.

The team also implemented some Vulkan improvements which will reduce the amount and size of shaders that need to be built during gameplay, which should heavily reduce shader stutters. There were also some Vulkan API initialization tweaks and promoting different Vulkan extensions to use the core methods. On top of that, SMAA anti-aliasing was implemented to further help visual quality and a bunch of fixes came to the kernel that took care of crashes from unallocated memory and more.

A custom filter was also made since a recent update broke the identifier of different controllers, including the Steam Deck, which solved the issue.

RPCS3 (PS3)

While this is less of an update, it was confirmed on December 25th that there are no PS3 games that can't boot at all. This means all PS3 games will at least boot from a black screen and show an image. This doesn't mean that they are playable, and doesn't mean all these games will run great on the Deck but it's an incredible step for the emulator.

PPSSPP (PSP)

PPSSPP had its 1.14 update last month which fixes a buunch of bugs and hanging. This release also fixes some rendering issues for different games and performance improvements for others. It also boasts overall software renderer improvements that boosts both performance and accuracy.

Retroarch

Retroarch had a plethora of changes in their 1.14.0 update that released last month. This includes menu icon improvements, localization updates, some input fixes, and making sure SRAM isn't initialized without content. It was primarily a fix update, didn't add any big improvements to anything that could affect the Steam Deck.

Duckstation (PS1)

The latest rolling release fixed a bunch of issues including a possible crash on shut down, per-game custom aspect ratios, folder changes not applying automatically, software cursor rendering, and toggling to show GPU usage at runtime. They also fixed a Linux compiling issue and building without SSE, which can directly affect the Deck!

In the latest preview build, they added the option to reset played time and work around the theme switching issue in 6.4.0.

And that is all we found for more recent updates! We will be checking periodically and making this a monthly report, depending on how much each emulator is updated. We will work to cover emulator updates as they come out too.

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