Ideally those performance problems will disappear in Cemu, but only time will tell.Ī bit more good news, though-because Breath of the Wild is heavily CPU limited, which is common in emulation, running it at resolutions higher than its native 720p should have little impact on performance. Even then, Breath of the Wild's framerate dips into the low 20s in some busy scenes. I'm no engineer, but it seems like Nintendo might be using memory typically allocated to the OS, just to eke out every bit of performance they can. So in a way the game pushes the hardware beyond what we assumed where the hard limits."Īnecdotally, I've noticed while playing Breath of the Wild on Wii U that it takes an unusually long time to load after pulling up the OS's Home menu. "Every public technical specification about Wii U states that the GPU only supports 16 texture mapping units per shader stage. I asked Exzap if he's already encountered anything interesting about how Breath of the Wild was programmed, and he said one thing did stick out. There are likely smaller, more nefarious bugs hiding in Breath of the Wild's vast world, and there's a very good chance that Nintendo used its hardware in ways no other Wii U game has before. Right now, Link's suite of rune abilities don't work at all in Cemu, enemies sometimes fall through floors, grass often doesn't render and lighting effects are wrong. My guess is that we will see small incrementals in speed for almost every future Cemu release." Additionally, Cemu is rather young so there is also optimization potential almost everywhere in the code. "That said, CPU bound games usually profit from improvements to the recompiler/JIT core. "I don't yet know precise details about why the game is running slow," he wrote.
Exzap wrote that it was too early to say what Breath of the Wild will need, specifically. I've previously written about how Dolphin's contributors made massive performance improvements to some games with new code.įor Breath of the Wild to run at its intended 30 frames per second, Cemu will likely need both general and specific improvements. Some emulator development will improve performance and compatibility for all games, while some fixes more accurately emulate specific attributes of the original hardware that individual games used in a particular way. The GameCube/Wii emulator Dolphin, which has been in open source development since 2008 (and around since 2003) only recently reached the milestone of being able to boot every single GameCube game. These settings should work for most people as a base however.Understanding the ins and outs of a piece of hardware as complex as the Wii U is a process that can take years. Once understanding what each setting does, we recommend you configure your own options. Setting this to 400% may cause some instabilities so we recommend a maximum of 300%. Increasing it makes shadows sharper and more accurate, while decreasing it can gain performance while sacrificing quality. This setting changes the resolution of the shadows. We recommend leaving this at the default setting. If you would like to use NVIDIA's implementation, or disable it entirely, you can switch to that here.
Anti-AliasingīOTW has anti-aliasing enabled by default. Run the game with different resolutions to see which works best for you. For lower resolution monitors, you can also set your resolution to a higher value for a higher quality anti-aliasing effect, however this is very computationally expensive. 1080p, 1440p (2K) or 2160p (4K).įor higher resolutions, consider using the Vulkan rendering API for increased performance. If you have a more powerful GPU, you may be able to change the resolution to a higher value, e.g.
This can be fixed by using mods open in new window for supported aspect ratios. Please be aware that while the game will render correctly at different aspect ratios, the UI elements will become stretched. If you have a monitor that isn’t 16:9, you may change the aspect ratio to match it in Cemu. You should see a menu on the right half of the window, where you can edit graphical settingsīreath of the Wild runs on a 16:9 aspect ratio on the Wii U.