Yuzu - Nintendo Switch Emulator

Yuzu is an open-source emulator that allows you to play Nintendo Switch games on platforms such as Windows, Android and Linux.

Yuzu allows you to experience all of your Nintendo Switch titles on different devices at the same level of performance your console provides.

Yuzu provides an easy-to-use interface where you can get up and running with emulating your favorite Switch games in no time.

Start playing your Switch games like you never experienced before. Play your favorite titles in 4K, transfer your games, and play with your friends in multiplayer.

Built with portability in mind, you don’t have to worry about compatibility with popular devices.

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Why Yuzu?

Discover what Yuzu has to offer being the top emulator in its class!

01.

Enhanced Switch Library Support

Yuzu supports a lot of the latest games that have been released and can run them without any massive issues such as crashes or hanging. A little over 4000 games are supported by Yuzu overall with various levels of stability, let that sink in for a moment.

02.

Game Save Status

No matter which mission or level you are at, the save state feature allows you to save and load your game from exactly where you left! You can now have an unlimited number of game saves that you can load again, losing progress is now an inconvenience of the past.

03.

Multiplayer Galore

Don’t you just get bored of playing single-player after a while? Well, Yuzu also allows you to play Multiplayer with your friends, family and general players in your region. Gone are the days of boring single-player, you can now get a full-fledged local Multiplayer experience.

04.

Easy Setup

Yuzu is not hard or complex to configure, you just need to follow a set of instructions, meet the requirements and that is it. The interface is straightforward and user-friendly so configuring and loading your games and navigating around is a breeze. Start playing your favorite Switch games instantly.

05.

Supports major platforms

No matter if you are running Windows, Android or Linux, Yuzu Emulator can be downloaded for all of these platforms and installed effortlessly. Being portable and so versatile, you don’t have to worry about carrying one device with you everywhere to use Yuzu, it can be installed on many different devices.

06.

Works with AMD and Nvidia

Yuzu works with both AMD and Nvidia graphic cards and does not require you to have special drivers in order for it to work. Don’t fret if you don’t have a dedicated GPU! Yuzu can still run non-demanding games at 30 FPS or more depending on the title and settings you choose.

07.

Export Game Saves

If you have been playing a game on your Switch and would like to export the save file you can do so with Yuzu or Yuzu Early Access version. You can then import it and start where you left. Take your progress on any other device with you with complete freedom over your game saves.

08.

Decryption Keys

Yuzu allows you to set up the decryption keys you have, this can be done in the “Yuzu” installation folder directly. These should never be used without explicit permission from the author and copyright holder of the games.

09.

Game Transfers

Yuzu has a function to allow you to move your game dumps from your SD card to your PC and vice-versa. This is great if you want to keep a backup. It supports the .xci and .ncp files. Never worry about losing your games ever again.

10.

Apply Game Updates

Is a new update now available for the game you have been playing? Not a problem! Yuzu allows you to stay up-to-date with your games by allowing you to update your Switch games in Yuzu. You can install updates with files in various formats including NCA and NSP. Updates can also be applied directly from your SD card or NAND whichever you have available with the required files. The update process is simple, easy and quick.

11.

Open-Source Code

Yuzu has been an open-source and free emulator since the start. Licensed under GPLv2, anyone can modify and use the code for personal or educational reasons. This license also allows anyone to create forks of the original code. Yuzu’s code being available online allowed it to gain so much traction in the first place as enthusiasts, developers and gamers all were contributing to this project when it was live.

Screenshots

Yuzu Emulator Playing Captain Toad Treasure Tracker

Pokemon Sword on Yuzu — Yuzu Emulator Playing Captain Toad Treasure Tracker

Yuzu Emulator Playing Super Smash Bros Ultimate

Yuzu Emulator Playing The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild

Requirements and Features

How does Yuzu Work?
Yuzu Features
Requirements

Yuzu is an emulator program, it simulates the Nintendo Switch so another hardware platform such as the PC can run it. Ultimately, it works by allowing you to play Switch games on other platforms.

There are different versions, you can choose to have Yuzu or Yuzu Early Access which is the beta version. You have to provide it your encryption keys, firmware and you can then configure it. Games are loaded on Yuzu via a ROM. (Remember, you need to get these legally with official copyright permission).

Yuzu also does CPU and GPU emulation because of the Nvidia Tegra X1 chip used in the Switch console. As the Nvidia Tegra X1 chip was based on ARM, it has to translate the ARM instructions into x86/x64 which are used by most platforms now including PCs. The GPU of the Switch console is based on the Maxwell architecture and Yuzu emulates this using popular APIs such as Vulkan and OpenGL. This is done to replicate how the GPU processed the graphics such as textures, shaders and other renders.

Memory management is also part of Yuzu, where it mimics how the Switch memory architecture works for system and GPU memory. Input and controller emulation is also performed by Yuzu, so it can mimic the Joy-Con and Pro Controller functions to a keyboard and mouse or a screen. The file system is also emulated to load the games as the original games came in installed packages or cartridges which were in different formats such as NSP, XCI and NCA.

All in all, Yuzu had to overcome various challenges to be able to emulate the Switch console to how good it can do it now. There were various issues that had to be overcome along the way and a major one was translating ARM instructions to x86. This led to further research into emulating the hardware and how it behaved with the Switch OS that was codenamed “Horizon”. Yuzu also had to implement game-specific fixes on the fly when reported by users or when it detected them via the log filtering feature it had built in. To make the process harder, game shaders had to be translated and placed in the cache the same way as they were generated dynamically on the Switch.

In summary, Yuzu works by mimicking the original hardware and software (OS) of the Nintendo Switch console. It allows users to run the Switch games on other platforms including PCs and Smartphones.

Yuzu is the premier choice of emulators when it comes to Nintendo Switch emulation. It offers features such as:

1: Allows you to emulate any Switch game on platforms including Android, Windows and Linux.

2: Resolution scaling allows you to increase the visual display of a game and make them look more crisp and clear.

3: Multiplayer support for playing online. You won’t be bored anymore playing on your own.

4: If you want to preserve your game status, you can do so via exporting your game saves.

5: Supports Vulkan and OpenGL API. The support for these graphics API help improve game rendering which in return provide higher frame rates.

6: Modding support for adding custom changes to your games. These allowed you to add custom graphical visuals, gameplay modification and even cheats.

7: Compatible with over 100+ games.

8: Unofficially works on Steam Deck.

9: Allows you to play with Xbox and PlayStation controllers.

10: Lightweight and portable.

Minimum CPU: Intel Core i5 / AMD Ryzen 3 / Qualcomm Snapdragon 460 for Android.

Recommended CPU: Intel Core i5 11^th Gen and above / AMD Ryzen 5 and above / Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 and above.

Minimum RAM: 8 GB for PC / Linux and for Android.

Recommended RAM: 16 GB

Minimum Graphics Card: Linux/Windows: Intel HD Graphics 4400/UHD 730 and above.

Recommended Graphics Card: Nvidia GTX 1650, Intel Iris Xe or Adreno 740 and above.

GPU API Support: They must support OpenGL 4.6 or Vulkan 1.1.

Host OS: Windows 10 and Windows 11 are both supported.

About what happened to Yuzu

Yuzu was sued by Nintendo America and paid USD 2.4 Million in settlement

The original developers behind Yuzu (Tropic Haze LLC) were taken to court earlier this year and agreed to pay the above sum to Nintendo, they were also ordered to shut down and destroy all the data. It is important to remember that any game you play you physically/digitally own and you should NEVER download ROMS without explicit written consent from the original author/copyright owner. Please always follow the law and make sure you own the official disc, cartridge or have the ROM downloaded with permission from the copyright holder. Whatever you do to play in an un-common way e.g. Using an Emulator, please acquire the legal permissions needed to do so before continuing from the original copyright authors.

Yuzu-emulator.net is only a fan-operated site created for preservation, educational, informational and archiving reasons. We are not affiliated or linked to the original developers of Yuzu and do not develop any such programs. We DO NOT host ANY files of Emulators including Yuzu and game ROMs on our site/server. We only reference from and link to publically available information already found on the internet. Yuzu is no longer in active development and has been discontinued, this means that there will be no further updates or releases. We do not endorse, support, or promote piracy, it is illegal and harmful to game developers and the whole industry.

Frequently Asked Questions

Below is a comprehensive collection of questions frequently asked by the users. We hope these will help you in finding the information to any unanswered questions you may have. We have also included questions and answers related to troubleshooting issues and errors.

What is Yuzu?

Yuzu is an open-source emulator for the Nintendo Switch from the creators of Citra. It is written in C++ with portability in mind, with builds actively maintained for Windows, Linux and Android. The emulator currently can play various commercial titles with varying degrees of success.

Is Yuzu Safe to Use?

Yuzu is an emulator and not a virus or a malware-infected program. However, if you have a copy make sure you scan it with an antivirus or download it from a trusted source such as an archive. Also, remember that it is no longer actively developed and any copies claiming to be recently released or “updated” are not true.

Which software license is Yuzu licensed under?

Yuzu is an open-source project, licensed under the GPLv2 (or any later version). Refer to the license document for more information.

Which platforms does Yuzu support?

Yuzu is actively tested and supported on various 64-bit versions of Windows (10 and up), Linux and Android (11 and up). macOS is no longer supported due to Apple deprecating OpenGL.

Is Yuzu Free?

Yuzu is fully open-source and does not require you to pay to use or download the emulator. Only Yuzu Early Access had a fee that gave you access to unreleased features before anyone else.

Does Yuzu still work?

Yuzu is not being developed anymore due to legal action taken by Nintendo. This means no further updates will arrive or code changes will be made to this emulator. However, those who have had it installed already will find that it still works on their platform. If you do uninstall it, you will not be able to download it again due to the files being removed.

Games fail to launch with the error: “WerFault.exe – Application Error – The application was unable to start correctly”

This typically occurs when yuzu runs out of RAM. Increase the size of your pagefile to resolve the issue.

Yuzu starts with the error “VCRUNTIME140_1.dll was not found”

Could also show up as “MSVCP140_ATOMIC_WAIT.dll was not found”.
Current versions of yuzu require the latest versions of Microsoft Visual C++.
1: Please download and install the following dependency:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2977003/the-latest-supported-visual-c-downloads
2: Go to Visual Studio 2015, 2017 and 2019, and select the link next to x64.

Yuzu starts with the error “Broken Vulkan Installation Detected”

This problem indicates that the Vulkan initialization failed on the previous boot of yuzu. Please perform the following:
1: Update your graphics drivers
2: Uninstall/update problematic screen-recording or overlay software
3: Verify your Vulkan installation by navigating to Emulation > Configure > Graphics > Click “Check for Working Vulkan”.

Yuzu starts with the error “Unable to start application: Os { code: 2, kind: NotFound, message: “The system cannot find the file specified.” }”

This problem is usually caused by a false positive of your antivirus software, most commonly by Avast and AVG.
These applications will often incorrectly detect yuzu as malicious software and delete the executable as a result.
You can confirm it is a false positive with an online scanner.
To fix this, you’ll need to either disable or uninstall your antivirus software. Make sure to reboot if you choose to uninstall it.
Afterwards, follow the instructions below for yuzu will not update further or starts with a Qt platform error to delete any residual files of the failed installation.

Yuzu will not update further or starts with a Qt platform error

1: Close all instances of yuzu and any installer processes you may have running.

2: Press Win+R, in the opened window type %localappdata% and press Enter.

3: Select the yuzu folder and delete it. If it is being used by another process, please double-check that you do not have any yuzu related applications running.

4: Launch the installer and install yuzu again.

Yuzu closes when opening Configure

This problem may be caused by a corrupt configuration file. Press Win+R, type %appdata%\yuzu\config and delete the qt-config.ini file. Your global settings will be lost after doing this, reconfigure accordingly.
Alternatively, some screen recording applications use dubious methods to inject themselves into software, causing crashes. Some examples are Reshade, GShade, Bandicam, Action and Screenrec. Uninstall the software if you have it installed. For Reshade-GShade if you need to keep it installed at the very least turn off its ability to touch Vulkan globally on windows to allow Yuzu&Vulkan to work again.
We recommend using OBS Studio, Radeon ReLive, Nvidia ShadowPlay or Microsoft XBox Game Bar.Overwolf is also a known cause of issues, we recommend avoiding it.

My game is Lagging and Dropping to Low Framerates

You are likely experiencing Shader Caching. Shaders are small programs running on a graphic card, responsible for rendering graphics like terrain, explosions, characters, etc. Since a PC cannot directly execute switch shaders, it first has to translate them to a format a PC can understand. This translation process is time consuming, and you’ll notice it in two ways:

1: While playing, if yuzu needs to translate a new shader, the game will stutter. Loading into a game for the first time can give long freezes due to the number of shaders. As you keep playing, the amount of stuttering will decrease.
2: When launching a game, the shader cache is loaded. To speed up this process there exists an additional “precompiled” cache. This cache may get reset every time you update yuzu or install a new GPU driver. The precompiled cache will then be compiled from scratch, causing a longer load time.

Vulkan and OpenGL have separate caches, but different OpenGL backends share the same cache. This means that on Nvidia you can build up shaders with less stutter on GLASM, then use GLSL for more performance.
IMPORTANT: Since the cache stores parts of the game, we don’t condone sharing or downloading these, since it is considered piracy.

How do I install game updates or DLC?

1: Installing updates and DLC is simple. In the top left corner of the emulator window, select File / Install Files to NAND, then select the file you wish to install.
2: Once installed, your files should load automatically and the installed update or DLC will be shown in the games list add-ons column of the corresponding game.
If you wish to activate/deactivate a specific update or DLC then right-click your game in the games list, select Properties, then enable or disable as needed

How do I uninstall game updates or DLC?

To delete your installed game Updates or DLCs, right click your game, then select Remove. From here you can delete/uninstall your game Updates and DLCs from the options list.

Yuzu closes when launching game?

If you happen to have issue launching game and have Nod32 ESET Antivirus installed. Please uninstall it and reboot. Or add yuzu into the HIPS exclusions. It is known to cause issue with emulators recently.

How do I add a save to my Game?

To add a save, simply right-click your game in the Games List, Select Open Save Data Location, then Select your User from the Profile Selector.

Once your Save Data Location is open, place your applicable game save in the folder presented to you.

How do I use my GameCube controller adapter?

The GameCube adapter communicates with yuzu over the libusb protocol. This works natively on Linux, but requires the installation of a compatible driver on Windows using Zadig.
Zadig driver installationPlug in the GameCube controller adapter if it hasn’t been already. Download and launch Zadig. If you’re using the Mayflash adapter, make sure you switch it to Wii U or Zadig won’t pick it up properly.
1: From the Options menu in Zadig, select List All Devices.
2: In the pulldown menu, select WUP-028. Ensure that its USB ID is 057E 0337.
3: If it does not appear in the list then try inserting the adapter (specifically its black USB cord) into another USB port.
4: On the right column, select WinUSB then click Replace Driver. Select Yes to modify the system driver.
When the notification that the driver is installed successfully is displayed, you can close Zadig and continue to configuring the controller with yuzu.

How do I set up my controls?

Since the Nintendo Switch is a complicated device controller input wise, you will need to change some input settings depending on the game you wish to play.

1: Open the yuzu settings and go to Controls.

2: Click on the checkbox next to Connect Controller if it is not already checked.

3: Select Pro Controller in the combobox below if needed (this is also the default).

4: Select your desired input device under Input Device.

5: Controllers: All buttons should automatically be mapped for the selected input device.

6: Keyboard: The Defaults button on bottom right sets default keyboard mappings.

7: Change mappings if desired.

8: Repeat steps for other players if desired.

9: Confirm with OK.

How do I build Yuzu for the OS that I use?

Take a look at the following guides for steps on building Yuzu for the following platforms:
1: Linux
2: Windows
3: Android
4: macOS