Yuzu Emulator

Yuzu is a popular open-source emulator for the Nintendo Switch and is the first to manage to emulate the video game console successfully. This Switch emulator is primarily written by the same team that created the popular 3DS Emulator, Citra.

While still a relatively new emulator, Yuzu has managed to already successfully emulate numerous elements of the Nintendo Switch at speed comparable to the original hardware.

The team has even emulated the BCAT Switch service that is used to add content to games dynamically. Using the emulated service, the Yuzu team can replicate and create their own in-game events.

An example of the things this enables is giving you extra items when starting the game in Breath of the Wild or more ability chunks in Splatoon 2.

In addition to this, the emulator can even render Switch games at higher resolutions than the original hardware intended, meaning you can play games at resolutions higher than 1080p.

While Yuzu can not currently run most commercial games, the team is making a tremendous amount of progress every day. The Yuzu team provides a list of all Switch games and how well they work with the emulator. You can view this list by checking out the compatibility list.

Recent versions of Yuzu have added support for Vulkan. Vulkan allows faster rendering thanks to less CPU overhead and also giving a speed boost to those using AMD GPUs.

Yuzu has builds available for Windows and Linux. Builds for macOS are no longer available due to Apple removing OpenGL support from macOS in favor of their own graphics API.

If you want to check out the development process of this Switch emulator, you can check out the official Yuzu GitHub repository. The repository also contains steps on how you can compile this Switch emulator on your system.

Below you will find download links for Yuzu for both the Windows and Linux operating systems.