Did Ryujinx just win the Switch emulation war with this release?
When it comes to Nintendo Switch emulation, Ryujinx and Yuzu are both good choices, and it’s often a matter of personal preference which one you’ll use (I’m Yuzu, personally). But with their recent releases, Ryujinx have definitely been taking the lead, at least for some users.
Ryujinx brings Mac support
The obvious one first: Ryujinx is now compatible with MacOS, making it, to my knowledge, the only decent Switch emulator on that platform (correct me if I’m wrong, I’m the Jon Snow of MacOS!)
Not only did they bring compatibility to that platform, they’re apparently taking huge advantage of the CPU similarities between Apple silicon and the Switch. Both running on an ARM base, the developers of Ryujinx claim this tremendously helps some steps of the emulator, basically with no emulation required at all in some critical steps, where the Mac chipsets can simply run exactly the same commands as the Switch.
The same can’t be said about GPU hardware however, with Mac’s infamous “Metal” API being apparently limited, and hard to work with.
With a combination of wins and obstacles though, Ryujinx have managed to bring their emulator to Apple’s platform, a huge step toward more users for that Switch emulator.
You can read more on the Ryujinx MacOS port in their article here.
LDN3: Online gaming with real Switch consoles
Both Yuzu and Ryujinx support a flavor of online play. What used to be limited to “people running the emulator only” is now opening to “local network with Switch owners” for Ryujinx, with version 3 of their LDN (Local Wireless) service. This new release allows Ryujinx players to connect and play with actual Nintendo Switch devices (running CFW) on a local network.
Although in terms of audience, this feature will be impacting less people than support for MacOS, it still shows Ryujinx is one step ahead of the competition when it comes to cool features.
With both Ryujinx and Yuzu supporting more and more games, it is becoming clear that the distinction will come from additional features such as more platform support and this new LDN3 release.
You can read about the LDN3 release here.
Will you “switch” to Ryujinx?
As far as I’m concerned, I’ll still be a Yuzu user until something really compelling for my own use case comes to Ryujinx. What about you? Are you a Ryujinx or a Yuzu fan? Maybe you use both? Let me know why you chose one or the other in the comments!
Downloads:
Why does this say “Ruyjinx” several times?
Fat fingers, we’ll fix! 😀
Yuzu, but I think to install Ryujinx because yuzu does not work with Bayonetta 3
I am a switch fan, not a modern emulator fan. Still, cool to see progress in these for people who happen to have really strong PCs and no switches 🙂
For me it’ll always be ryujinx. Yuzu is built off stolen code from them anyways and always implements fixes after they’ve already been on ryujinx
Source? Also Yuzu came out before Ryujinx, unless you’re talking about the last updates.
Don’t really have a preference, whichever gets games played in my opinion. And it’s pretty amazing to have not just 1 but 2 emulators for PC when the system it’s emulating is still current. Can’t wait to see how these emulators frow with age. Awesome read as usual, thanks.
how is it a war?
Haha, it’s not, we just felt it was a nice catchy title. We love both yuzu and Ryujinx
I jumped to Ryujinx for Pokemon SV, there are over 270 users online and I’m in several discords for finding trades and co-op.
I transfer the save to my modded switch for offline play when I’m AFK, it’s way better than juggling lan-play servers.
Ryujinx is just better for lan games, for everything else I just play on the console.
I prefer Yuzu overall. That said I’ll run whatever one works best for the game I’m throwing at it. They’re both free so you can get the best of both worlds.
Sure Yuzu is great for offline games, but so is my Switch.
Ryu just does online better for Pokemon SV and Animal Crossing IMO, instead of multiple “rooms” there is simply one. If someone is hosting their island on AC you can find it without juggling servres. For Pokemon trades and union you can send someone a pin and it just works. There is also little overhead for Ryu since they use P2P connections.
On Yuzu you can’t even host a room without forwarding ports.
Yuzu might play Pokemon better but that’s not what my OP was about.
Ryujinx for sure! Yuzu wouldnt even open a game that just came out in september. I recently installed a switch rom that just came to the switch console and Ryujinx played it. Cutscenes were choppy, but overall gameplay was smooth! I have a HP Notebook with a touch screen.
One key distinction IMHO is the fact that Ryujinx supports FullXCI dumps, which is perfect for those who do archiving and Datting for No-Intro. For those who don’t know what that means, FullXCI is a dumped Game Card with the key data prepended to the header area. The size of the file is 1KB bigger as a result, but it still means the key data is included in the card file. Outside of that detail, FullXCI and XCI are identical in every way. Yuzu has yet to implement support for FullXCI.
What does this “key data” do exactly? I thought xci was a full dump of the cartridge? No-Intro? Source?
Ryujinx works better for me when playing Pokemon Scarlet and Sword. Been using yuzu in a long time but recently when im booting up Yuzu, it takes too long to load and to run games too (aside from loading the shader cache) it always has random crashes on Pokemon Sword when about playing 30 mins and random freezes whenever im catching a pokemon, memory leaks more often but Ryujinx however runs pretty great for me, it opens faster, play games faster. Doesn’t crash Pokemon Sword playing for about an 1hr straight without issues even Pokemon Scarlet didn’t crash and runs better aswell unlike Yuzu randomly crashes about 15mins during selecting your starter pokemon there. Ryujinx is certainly catching up.
Ryujinx because it runs much better the only game I am interested in… Mario + Rabbids. Tried so many versions of yuzu waiting for the shadow bug to get fixed for me but never did. Now on Ryujinx I am on world 3 with only 2 crashes so far.