Yuzu Nintendo Switch Emulator Now Has Multi-Core Support

The Nintendo Switch emulator called Yuzu has been available for sometime now, allowing users to play certain Switch games on their PCs. However, this emulator recently received an update that adds multi-core support, which is huge news for anyone that has a newer PC.

In case you aren’t sure how this all works, switching from single to multi-core support means that there will be big performance enhancements when using the emulator. The latest build can be downloaded by becoming a member of the Yuzu Team’s Patreon, where they are regularly improving this emulator. They said the following about this recent update:

“As many of you might know, yuzu is considered a HLE (high level emulation) emulator. This means that instead of running the real Switch OS (known as Horizon), yuzu has recreated its own version of the OS, built entirely from the ground up. Like your PC, the Switch has multiple cores (4, actually), and the Horizon OS can run multiple tasks in parallel on these cores using a kernel construct known as a thread. However, due to limitations of our old kernel design taken from Citra, yuzu was actually emulating this behavior using a single core on your host PC! This had led to an absurdly high CPU requirement for users.

So, what is “Multicore CPU emulation”? Put simply, instead of emulating the CPU on a single thread yuzu will now emulate the CPU using multiple threads; 4 to be precise – one for each Switch CPU core. Although it might sound simple or easy, it is nevertheless the biggest undertaking this project has seen up until now.”

Of course, it isn’t perfect yet and there are several games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Pokemon Sword & Shield that perform well below 60fps. However, things will continue to improve and hopefully all of the Switch’s library of games will be functioning to their fullest potential on Yuzu in the future.