The Cemu team have released Cemu version 1.6.4 to Patreon backers recently, giving gamers an opportunity to play the latest version of the Wii U emulator a week earlier than the general public. This was published through the Patreon page of the Cemu team, but backers also let loose some preview videos and some informational guides as to what’s new and improved in version 1.6.4 of Cemu.

For games like Xenoblade Chronicles X, the Cemu team have managed to fix some of the over-saturated bloom in the sky, toning it down and getting it to look the way it does on the Wii U. There’s also blink-and-you-missed-it bicubic filtering added to the graphics options to clean up overlays when upscaling. Ultimately this removes the jagged edges on sprite renders and mipmaps rendered up close.

In layman terms, the bicubic filtering upgrade over the bilinear interpolation allows for cleaner text on screen so that you should be able to easily read games with a lot of textual dialogue between characters or narration. Definitely a huge help for games like Xenoblade Chronicles X, Citizens of Earth or Child of Light.

Games like Steamworld Dig and Super Smash Bros have also been improved, fixing the bloom issues with the shaders that caused some stages to simply not render properly in Super Smash Bros. Cemu 1.6.4 also contains a number of profile updates for various games so that the compatibility for render performance has been increased, nearly making games like Splatoon, Pikmin and Mario Kart 8 nearly run 1:1 to the way they do on the Wii U.

You can see some of the new changes and differences between 1.6.3 and 1.6.4 of Cemu with the preview video below from reznoire.

On a more technical note, some gamers asked over on the GBA Temp forums about compatibility for games like Shovel Knight and Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze on the Wii U. However they are suffering from a particular bug that renders them unplayable at the moment when it comes to the online multiplayer. Local multiplayer does work, however.

You can see how well Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze works with the gameplay video from reznoire.

Other titles still have major compatibility issues as far as booting is concerned, such as Pokken Tournament, which reportedly doesn’t get past the title screen at the moment. However, the Cemu team is making grand progress in such a short amount of time with each new update, so keep an eye out for Pokken Tournament eventually becoming playable on the emulator.

With version 1.6.4 available to the Patreon backers, expect to see the public release of Cemu 1.6.4 make its way onto the official Cemu website starting next week.