Mini-Update: Memory, accuracy, and performance improvements! (Patreon)

Hey Patrons! Thank you for your incredible support these past few months! We wouldn't be able to work so hard on yuzu without it.

We've heard feedback that you'd like to hear more updates from the team, so we wanted to share some of the other great progress we've been making. While we released a major update to our renderer only a few days ago, there have actually been even more great changes to yuzu since then!

One of these was a major change to how yuzu emulates the Nintendo Switch operating system. While the technical details may sound a bit murky, the gist of it is that we changed how we manage Switch's ARM (CPU) cores to improve accuracy, improve performance, and reduce memory usage. In short, we now emulate a single ARM core for each of Switch's 4 physical cores, rather than one per emulated thread. This has numerous improvements, among them:

• This drastically decreases our memory footprint. You likely no longer need a huge page file to run yuzu! This should improve stability and reduce crashes for many users.
• Some softlocks are fixed, such as in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate fights.
• Performance improvements have been reported – For example, the map screen in Super Mario Odyssey should be much faster, and Doom runs much faster.

In addition to this, there have been a boatload of GPU fixes, especially surrounding the new texture cache. One such change was fixing transparent geometry in the Xenoblade Chronicles titles (Vulkan only, for now). There has also been an improvement to NVDEC emulation (in game videos) to reduce frame drops, making video playback far smoother. We also fixed many shutdown crashes, and fixed the latest update to Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

As always – thank you for your support, and stay safe!

- The yuzu development team