March 2019 Patreon Preview Release!

NOTE: This release is now considered outdated. Patreon subscribers should download newer releases through the installer using the Early Access release channel.  

It’s time for another Patreon Preview Release! You can download this release below (the download is attached to this post).  

We heard from you in our most recent poll that performance was a priority, so that’s the focus of this month’s Patreon release. We’ve rewritten our asynchronous GPU feature (which utilizes a second thread for GPU emulation) to be a bit more stable and performant, and furthermore we’ve rewritten our GPU memory access to be faster and more accurate. You can learn a bit more about these changes in our recent March update.

 Download this release for Windows

While your results may vary (and we look forward to hearing from you!), our testing has shown performance improvements between 25% and 50% for games like Super Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild. To see these speedups, you’ll want to make sure that you enable asynchronous GPU emulation, which you can find under: 

Emulation > Configure > Graphics > Use asynchronous GPU emulation 

This feature is still turned OFF by default, as it’s not quite as stable as we’d like. You may find that some games work a lot faster with it, while other games (such as Pokemon: Let’s Go) are not as stable. We’ll continue to work on this though and future builds should fix these issues! As always, we appreciate reports of any issues on our Discord. 

Thank you again for your support, and we hope you enjoy this release! Stay tuned for updates on what each of our developers is working on, and what to expect with the next release!

Changelog 

• Use HostPtr instead of CPU VAddr for rasterizer cache management for improved performance 
• Rewrite asynchronous GPU emulation for improved performance and stability 
• Rewrite GPU virtual memory manager for improved performance and accuracy 
• Fix crash in Super Mario Odyssey world transitions when asynchronous GPU is enabled 
• Bug fixes & miscellaneous improvements 
• All changes and improvements of the recent Canary #1986 release