Recently I highlighted that the Nintendo 3DS emulator Citra was doing a big move over to Vulkan, giving it a modern rendering system to keep on pushing performance. The latest updates also give a big boost for Linux / Steam Deck.
The developers regularly put up development builds you can download. In their Discord, they mentioned that the recent Canary 2658 release switched the compiler to clang on Linux which "Gives a performance boost of 20 to 30% on Linux devices" so this should be great for future Nintendo 3DS emulated gaming on Linux and Steam Deck.
Pictured - Super Mario 3D Land, Credit: Citra
Nice to see a continued focus on performance for Linux!
Any readers using Citra? What do you think to it?
You can see more about Citra on the official site.
Any readers using Citra? What do you think to it?I last used it a couple of years ago, when I was still adjusting to being a Linux PC-gamer after decades exclusively in the console (and particularly handheld) space, just to revisit some familiar games for a brief time, and it worked amazingly well even back then!
I would highly recommend Kirby Triple Deluxe if anyone's looking for a charming, chilled-out 3DS platformer, by the way - and with emulators you can remap the button layout to something that's actually comfortable to use, which is something that the original game didn't allow on real hardware.
OpenGL is considered an ageing graphics API, with buggy and slow driversThe drivers aren't buggy nor slow on Linux or Nvidia+Windows.
Tha makes me think that their claimings about speed increases by switching to Vulkan are related to Windows+Intel.
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