Yuzu is pretty optimized by default for popular game titles like the Legend of Zelda series. However, you will see occasionally that there will be FPS drops or lags. In other words, your game will stutter and feel slow to your inputs be it if you are playing from a controller or a keyboard.
Who doesn’t want better performance anyway? Tuning Yuzu emulator for better performance resulting in a smoother gameplay is not hard.
Optimal Yuzu Settings for High FPS – Get 60 FPS
Contents
Below we will go through different steps to ensure you are getting the most out of Yuzu and your Switch emulation experience.
Pay Attention to System Requirements
These are very important to get right. You need to make sure you meet the minimum requirements to run Yuzu. If your PC or smartphone does not meet even the minimum requirements, your games will lag and stutter, period! There is no way around skipping the requirements.
Always try to match the recommended requirements to avoid any bottlenecks from your side. These are set for a reason after countless hours of testing for a reason.
Check your GPU Drivers
GPU drivers are essential to have installed for your graphics card to perform at its peak. They come with bug fixes and performance improvements at almost every update and benefit you by providing a smoother gaming experience.
With Yuzu, you can install custom drivers such as Mesa Turnip and Adreno official drivers, in a nutshell, the Mesa Turnip drivers help in giving an FPS and stability increase as they are open-source and built by the community. The Adreno drivers are the official drivers from Qualcomm and are a little less performant but a lot more stable.
GPU Accuracy and ATSC Recompression
GPU accuracy is the quality and reliability of the rendering and performance of the calculations it does. You can manually change this setting in Yuzu.
The below GPU accuracy settings are present in Yuzu and this is what they mean:
Low: Much slower renders and if your system just about meets the requirements.
Normal: Your system meets the requirements and only some games may experience rendering issues.
High: You can experiment with this setting as for some games this setting seems to make them render the worlds much better.
Extreme: This is recommended if you have a more powerful system and above recommended system specifications.
You can change the GPU accuracy in Yuzu by following the steps below:
- Launch Yuzu and go to “configuration”.
- Go to the “Graphics” tab and select on “Advanced”.
- Now under “Advanced Graphics Settings” select the accuracy level you would like to have.
ASTC is a compression format supported by the Switch console. In a nutshell, it allows your GPU to use less VRAM so it can perform better and faster. It does this by recompressing the decompressed formats for a format that desktop-level GPUs from Nvidia and AMD can work with. Below are the ideal ASTC settings according to the memory your GPU has:
- Normal: 6 to 8 GB VRAM
- BC3: 4 to 6 GB
- BC1: 4 GB
Enable Async Presentation
Asynchronous presentation feature was added to Yuzu in build 1419, it is currently supported only by the Vulkan API. Turning this “On” in Yuzu will give you an instant performance boost in the FPS you see. It can do this by moving the presentation layers to separate CPU threads.
Async presentation is not beneficial on every game, you may have to do some testing for example, some users were able to see a 10-40% increase in titles like Super Mario Odyssey and Metroid Dread. This particularly helps if you have a lower-end PC too.
Force Maximum Clocks
In general, some GPUs in emulation are not utilized to their full power. This increases the clock speed of your GPU to the maximum always while Yuzu emulator is running. This ensures all of your GPU resources are being used to their extent and not leaving any performance on the table in terms of FPS and smoothness.
The only downside to this optimization is that your GPU will run hot. You will see your temperatures increase but those should not be of concern for small gaming sessions. However, we would advise you not to keep this setting for longer sessions.
Reactive Flushing
This is usually enabled when you are running a mod such as a 60 FPS mod. When you turn off reactive flushing in Yuzu, it improves rendering accuracy at the cost of some performance drawbacks. These drawbacks are lower FPS as the GPU is working harder to better render the 3D objects in the game around you.
Follow the settings below:
Decode ATSC ASYNC TOTK: Off
All other settings: On
Async Shader Builder
Activating this setting will resolve any stutters you may experience in a certain number of titles. An example of such a game where stutters are resolved is TOTK (The Legend of Zelda). It is also mainly more effective when you are running the Vulkan API. Your FPS will also increase or stabilize higher after a little while as it takes some time for the shader cache to build up. You may still see some lags and stutter in the start as your shader cache is building but once it has built, you should see better performance in that game.
More Yuzu optimization tips
- Use game mods or texture packs to enhance your experience, these texture packs are game-specific.
- If you are using Linux as your OS and you can use the Vulkan API, you may notice overall higher FPS and smoother gameplay across the board.
- You may also see an improvement when disabling VSync, this can be done by going to Graphics > VSync Mode > Off. You can try this with trial and error and see if it helps you with certain games.
Optimizing Yuzu Emulator Performance
Let’s be real here, you don’t want to enjoy your favorite game while its lagging and stuttering. This is very annoying and can put you off from playing a game. Hopefully, the Yuzu optimization methods shared above will help you get a better gaming experience, increase your FPS and that you are lag-free. If you have any tips that you have used and would like us to add to the above to help others, please reach out.
