Nintendo Switch emulation, as great as it has already been, is getting even more spectacular. Today, the progress report for Ryujinx – one of the Nintendo Switch emulators available on Linux/PC – has been released for the month of January. But don’t let me do all the talking; just look at this clip for a few moments:

https://streamable.com/82en1v

This clip was posted as part of their blog post. This, right here, is a comparison between GLSL, the shader language for OpenGL, and SPIR-V, the shader language for Vulkan. The difference is night and day. Observe how much more quickly the game caches shaders on SPIR-V. And also notice that SPIR-V is only using a single thread, rather than GLSL’s multi-threaded processor usage.

Notice, too, that a few emulated games previously running on Vulkan had graphical glitches, depending on the GPU vendor:

They’ve now been fixed:

Certain games that didn’t run at all through Vulkan now do, including Shin Megami Tensei V, Paper Mario: The Origami King, and Monster Hunter Rise.

Vulkan came as part of a pull request over six months ago and is still not quite ready to be merged into the main branch, but words alone can’t describe how amazing it is to see the work done so far.

This was what I primarily wanted to highlight from the blog post. There’s also been GPU improvements, improved troubleshooting with FFMPEG, FCVTMS implementation for the CPU, NSD resolution, network error improvements, SSL connectivity (which apparently allowed the Ryujinx team to watch the Nintendo Direct directly from the emulator), a cheat manager, an analog stick range modifier, and so much more. There’s also “strong” progress with their new Avalonia UI, as gdkchan hinted at with our interview. Check the progress report for more info!

Very pleased to see the hard work going into Ryujinx. If you’d like to know more about Ryujinx, check out the incredible interview that we had with its creator, gdkchan, and if you want to learn how to emulate Nintendo Switch games yourself, have a look at our guide.