The industrious development team behind Yuzu, a PC emulator for the Nintendo Switch, announced an update that enables true multi-core scalability. For an emulator that mainly used a single CPU core until now, this update is a huge milestone in rendering capacity and most games already benefit from this development.
The most obvious advantage from now having access to more CPU cores is that Switch games are rendered with much higher and more stable frame rates. This is particularly welcome news for moderately-specced PC’s since an emulator that unloaded most of the work onto one processor core meant that you needed a really high-end CPU to enjoy most games (or one hell of an overclock).
With access to more processing threads, even older, multi-core CPU’s should offer a much smoother experience. The video below shows the YouTuber BSoD Gaming nearly doubling his frame rate on the 7-year-old Core i5 4690k (at 4.2 GHz) in games like Pokemon Sword and Shield.
While not all games will necessarily see this kind of gain, every Nintendo Switch title compatible with the emulator should now have more CPU cores at its disposal for rendering. This means significantly higher frames for games that benefit (particularly newer games), and much faster loading times all round.
The only catch is that enabling multi-core locks your frame rate to 30fps, but BSoD made use of 60 FPS mods to get past this hurdle. You can download them directly from links in the description to his video, or from sites like gamebanana.com.
This update is still the privilege of early-access Yuzu patreon backers for the time being, so this is an excellent excuse to become a supporter if you can! Otherwise, keep an eye on the Yuzu website for when a public release becomes available here.
Enjoy!
Pieter hails all the way from the tip of southern Africa and suffers from serious PC technophilia. Therapists say it is incurable. Now he has to remind himself constantly that gaming doesn’t count as a religion even if DRM is the devil. Thankfully, writing reviews sometimes helps with the worst symptoms.