The YUZU Switch Emulator receives major performance gains with its newest updates

DMA acceleration and core timing changes deliver big performance gains in the YUZU Switch emulator

Over the past few years, Switch emulation has improved significantly, so much so that many of Switch’s most popular new releases are now playable on PC on launch day though the YUZU Switch emulator. While playing new console games on PC though emulation may be a tricky topic, it cannot be denied that YUZU is an impressive piece of software, and the YUZU team has revealed some impressive improvements with their February 2023 emulator update. 

For starters, recent core timing changes within the YUZU emulator have “reduced CPU use by 5-20% across the board on Windows”, offering users better system performance and reduced system power consumption. This is great news for both performance nuts and gamers who use YUZU on laptops and handhelds. Sadly, the YUZU team has not given fans a deep dive into this change, though we can expect to hear more about it in YUZU’s March developer update. 

Another big addition to YUZU is “DMA Acceleration”, which is a texture download accelerator for the Switch’s DMA engine. This feature attacks a major bottleneck within the YUZU emulator, using the power of PC-grade GPUs handle texture downloads. Before this update, these processes were handled using CPU cycles and system memory, which is much slower than using a GPU and its VRAM.

  
While DMA acceleration won’t dramatically improve the performance of all games when using YUZU, it has a huge impact on titles that are impacted by DMA performance. Metroid Prime Remastered sees its performance increase by over 3x, as you can see in the chart below. When a game benefits from faster texture downloads, YUZU’s DMA acceleration update really shines.

A lot of other changes have been made to YUZU that increases the emulator’s performance and accuracy in other areas, but the emulator’s CPU timing changes and DMA acceleration are the most significant upgrades that have been made to the latest builds of YUZU for those who want to play Switch games at insane framerates.

If you want to learn more about YUZU’s most recent changes, you can read about them here.

You can join the discussion on the YUZU Switch emulators’ performance enhancing updates on the OC3D Forums.