2021 is finally here, and we spent last year's final months on a compatibility expansion and bug-fixing spree. But before we take a look at all the improvements that finished out the year, we want to take a moment to celebrate and say thank you to everyone who helped us reach our first Patreon goal—Amiibo emulation support—so quickly; we'll be working hard to implement this feature into the emulator ASAP, so stay tuned! Separately, with today's emulator update we have delivered on our promise to list the names of those in the $10 & $20 monthly Patreon tiers in the Help > About section of the emulator; thank you for your support! We've added a couple of new Patreon goals and lowered the threshold for our Vulkan goal. These tasks are already on our to-do list, however meeting the below Patreon goals gives us the resources to immediately tackle each respective feature.
(GOAL MET) - Amiibo Emulation
In-progress, ETA 3-4 weeks:
Allows emulated scans of a selected Amiibo and subsequently unlock exclusive content in games which support this function.
$1000/month (almost there!) - User Profile Support
ETA once goal is reached: ~1 month:
This will allow the creation of multiple user profiles, the option of using a custom name instead of the current default name "Player", and the ability to use a custom profile picture instead of the current hardcoded (and very old) Ryujinx logo. We will also attempt to load the official profile pictures from the installed firmware, and provide them as an additional option.
$1250/month - Vulkan GPU Backend
ETA once goal is reached: ~6-8 weeks:
This one is a biggie. Vulkan will significantly improve performance for and reduce the amount of graphical glitches on AMD GPUs and intel iGPUs. Moreover, SPIR-V (Vulkan shader language) is faster than GLSL (OpenGL shader language) so, even without a disk shader cache, there would be significantly less stutter on first run than on native OpenGL.
$1500/month - ARB Shaders
ETA once goal is reached: ~3-4 weeks:
ARB shaders will further reduce stuttering on first-run by improving the shader compilation speed on NVIDIA GPUs using the OpenGL API.
And now the progress report!GPU improvements:
Buffer to texture copies size fix
A bug on buffer to texture copies caused some Unreal Engine 4 games to crash. This bug was causing the emulator to copy too much data which in turn caused memory corruption, as unrelated data was being overwritten in memory. Fixing this allowed a few Unreal Engine 4 games to boot further, with the tested titles now reaching menus, but they unfortunately still crashed when attempting to start a new game.
(GOAL MET) - Amiibo Emulation
In-progress, ETA 3-4 weeks:
Allows emulated scans of a selected Amiibo and subsequently unlock exclusive content in games which support this function.
$1000/month (almost there!) - User Profile Support
ETA once goal is reached: ~1 month:
This will allow the creation of multiple user profiles, the option of using a custom name instead of the current default name "Player", and the ability to use a custom profile picture instead of the current hardcoded (and very old) Ryujinx logo. We will also attempt to load the official profile pictures from the installed firmware, and provide them as an additional option.
$1250/month - Vulkan GPU Backend
ETA once goal is reached: ~6-8 weeks:
This one is a biggie. Vulkan will significantly improve performance for and reduce the amount of graphical glitches on AMD GPUs and intel iGPUs. Moreover, SPIR-V (Vulkan shader language) is faster than GLSL (OpenGL shader language) so, even without a disk shader cache, there would be significantly less stutter on first run than on native OpenGL.
$1500/month - ARB Shaders
ETA once goal is reached: ~3-4 weeks:
ARB shaders will further reduce stuttering on first-run by improving the shader compilation speed on NVIDIA GPUs using the OpenGL API.
And now the progress report!GPU improvements:
Buffer to texture copies size fix
A bug on buffer to texture copies caused some Unreal Engine 4 games to crash. This bug was causing the emulator to copy too much data which in turn caused memory corruption, as unrelated data was being overwritten in memory. Fixing this allowed a few Unreal Engine 4 games to boot further, with the tested titles now reaching menus, but they unfortunately still crashed when attempting to start a new game.