Yuzu (emulator)


Yuzu, stylized as yuzu, is a free and open-source emulator of the Nintendo Switch. Yuzu was announced to be in development on January 14, 2018, 10 months after the release of the Nintendo Switch. It is developed in C++.
The emulator is made by the developers of the Nintendo 3DS emulator Citra, with significant code shared between the projects. Originally, Yuzu only supported test programs and homebrew, but as of July 2019, a handful of games work without issue. A list of games that are compatible with the emulator is maintained on the official website.

Features

Yuzu uses a network service called Boxcat as a replacement for Nintendo's BCAT dynamic content network.
Yuzu also offers a resolution rescaling feature that simulates docked, undocked and beyond-native resolutions.
In December 2019, Yuzu added an experimental Vulkan renderer to its Early Access build. As of April 2020, this Vulkan renderer is also being used to rebuild MacOS compatibility via MoltenVK, as the Yuzu team stopped maintaining MacOS versions of Yuzu after Apple deprecated OpenGL.
On May 9, 2020 the development team announced an update that included experimental multi-core CPU emulation.

Reception

In October 2018, Kotaku published an article noting that Super Mario Odyssey was playable. The author of the article expressed concern with the ability of Yuzu to emulate games that were available commercially at the time.
PC Gamer noted that the emulator was able to run shortly after the games' release, albeit with audio issues.
In October 2019, Gizmodo published an article noting that Yuzu was able to emulate some games at a frame rate roughly on par with the actual console hardware.