If you’ve been following some of the feedback that users have been giving for the newest version of Cemu, 1.6.0, you may have noticed that it’s not all sunshine and Pikmin in the world of emulation. You may have noticed on the GBA Temp forums, where the Cemu devs regularly post, some of the feedback from Patreon backers hasn’t been quite as positive as you may have hoped.
Many users expected the even release of 1.6.0 to the build that ended all previous builds, but the release seems to juggle between compatibility and performance. Some games are now playable, while other games are a little less playable.
The Reddit thread listing the changelog definitely notes that there are additional CPU instructions, handlers and recompiling for better emulation precision when handling ROMs and game profiles. They’ve also improved various support for threading and state executions with additional APIs, along with improved texture handling, caching and optimization.
In short, Cemu 1.6.0 adds better compatibility for more Wii U software.
However, some games that worked really well in 1.5.6 haven’t actually improved in 1.6.0, or in some cases perform a little worse, according to some users.
In the case of Super Smash Bros on the Wii U, running on a GTX 965m the game has only minor gains from 1.5.6 to 1.6.0, but still suffers from drops and audio problems. YouTube user FateAwaitsEmu did videos between both versions that you can check out below.
Loading times aren’t that bad, but other users running Super Smash Bros shows rather poor performance on a GTX 1070 with an i7-6700K. User Soplox offered up 10 minutes worth of gameplay that doesn’t appear to have improved much beyond 1.5.6.
Other games also had similar results, going from minor gains to negative gains, with users dropping frames between small single digits to the double digits. According to Reddit user GH56734, he mentions that the added library improvements made Cemu more compatible but at th expense of performance for some users, writing in the Reddit thread…
“It seems this release added new graphical libraries, which made tons of games that previously wouldn’t work playable, however in some cases this caused the system requirements to jump slightly (which will eventually stabilize back when optimizations are made).
“Business as usual for emulators. See bsnes’s system requirements jumping when mid-scanline emulation was added, and then the optimized and more accessible bsnes-mercury was a thing.”
Some users have reported more and frequent crashing in Super Mario Maker, while others have reported minor slowdown when caching occurs.
Of course, Cemu is a work in progress so expect hiccups along the way. You can download 1.6.0 for free by visiting the official Cemu website.
