With so much news circulating around Nintendo’s popular new open-world adventure game for the Wii U and Nintendo Switch, it was easy to miss one of the more important stories that has managed to climb its way up out of the gutter trash of gossip, click-bait, hate-bait and endless discussions about identity politics: You can now partially play The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on your PC using the Cemu 1.7.3 Wii U emulator.
The current version of Cemu 1.7.3 is available right now over on the Patreon page for the Cemu team. It’ll cost you $5 to get your hands on the early rendition of the emulator. Alternatively, you can wait until Saturday to download it for free from the official Cemu website.
The current version of the emulator has actually enabled gamers to partially play Breath of the Wild at somewhat decent framerates. The resolution makes the game look absolutely astounding. The per-pixel lighting and hard shadow contrasts for the shaders really stand out when yo usee it running on a high-end PC. There’s a demonstration video below from YouTube user CryZENx.
Now the reason I say “partially playable” is because you can clearly see that Link occasionally sinks through the geometry of the ground. There are some obvious sound effect displacement issues, and the frame-rate is clearly not up to par, averaging between 19fps and 21fps.
Link also isn’t the only one who sinks throught he ground… the NPCs also float or sink as well.
According to word around the block, the Cemu team expects at least another four the five months worth of updates to the Cemu emulator before it can run The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild decently on a high-end CPU.
And speaking of high-end CPUs…
AMD’s Ryzen 7 series has been making a lot of waves in the PC parts marketplace. Quite naturally a lot of gamers are curious how well the Ryzen holds up when benchmarking it on emulation. So what did they do? Well, they tried Mario Kart 8 on Cemu version 1.7.3 using the Ryzen 1700x. You can see how well it works with the video below from LOHTEC.
The Ryzen 1700x manages on average around 48fps through 51fps. That’s not bad as an average, but it clearly isn’t hitting 60fps as a standard. Infrequently in the video when the action is light the game will occasionally top out at 60fps, but only rarely.
This is obviously not good news for the Ryzen given that the Cemu is heavily reliant on the CPU, and as far as that’s concerned the 1700x isn’t up to par with Intel.
You can look for the latest version of the Cemu emulator to be made available for the public this upcoming Saturday on March 18th.
