Ryujinx Switch emulator adds Vulkan renderer to main build after a year of testing
A year after testing the waters by releasing a beta build of their Nintendo Switch emulator that used the graphics API Vulkan, the Ryujinx development team has finally merged it into the main release. Utilizing Vulkan, in the case of most emulators, allows for far better performance, and that extends to Ryujinx as well. This major change will make compiling shaders noticeably faster than with OpenGL, though when the latest release featuring Vulkan does release, it will cause your current built shader cache to stop existing.
First of all, you need to know that any shader caches you've cultivated over the years will sadly cease to exist once you update beyond version 1.1.200 and boot a game. While this does mean that you will start from scratch in every title, they should be much quicker and less painful to rebuild thanks to SPIR-V's compile speed! Should you choose to use Vulkan.
Other than this... not much. AMD and Intel users will want to immediately set Vulkan as their backend and never look back while Nvidia users have the luxury of choice. While in most cases Vulkan will likely be the better pick due to its lower shader stutter, there may be some games that render/perform better in one or the other, so the world truly is your oyster. Shaders built for one backend will rebuild into the complimentary set for the other when you switch, so nothing is lost by trying both. A good strategy may be to undergo the initial stutter with Vulkan and then switch to OpenGL if it performs a little better. Your choice.
The Ryujinx team provided a direct comparison between OpenGL and Vulkan, showcasing a large collection of graphical bugs being fixed using the latter, in cases like Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Splatoon 2, and the recently released Live a Live.
Well this is quite emotional isn't it? It feels like a huge milestone, because it sure as hell is one. The fight against shader stutter is being won, the path forward for AMD and Intel GPU owners is starting to clear and our GPU developers in gdkchan and riperiperi can maybe take a well-deserved rest. Don't be shy to congratulate the dev team for this achievement and thank them for their tireless work!
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