The Ryujinx Switch emulator now provides “close to flawless” Red Dead Redemption support
PC gamers can now run Red Dead Redemption at 60 FPS (and beyond) through Switch emulation
As part of the emulator’s latest blog post, the Ryujinx team have confirmed that their Switch emulator can now run run Red Dead Redemption at 60 FPS and beyond on PC.
While the emulator played the game with some graphical issues when it launched this summer, emulator updates have quickly arrived to make the game run incredibly well through Ryujinx. Now the team says that the game runs “as close to flawless as we dare call anything”. This is a big deal given this game’s lack of an official PC release.
With Ryujinx having fairly modest hardware requirements, the hardware requirements for running Red Dead Redemption on PC through emulation are low. This is mostly due to the Switch’s relatively simple, and weak, Tegra X1 hardware. With Switch emulation being “GPU-lite”, the Ryujinx team says that “resolution scaling to 4K or higher is effectively free on any competent GPU”.
Big Radeon improvements
New updates for the Ryujinx Switch Emulator have delivered huge improvements for users of AMD Radeon GPUs. Simply put, AMD and Nvidia GPUs do not work in the same way. Nintendo’s Switch console uses an Nvidia-designed SOC called the Tegra X1, and it uses an Nvidia graphics card. This fact alone had made emulating Switch games on PCs with Nvidia GPUs a simpler task. Doing the same emulation on AMD graphics cards can be challenging. This is due to hardware and driver differences.
Switch emulation on PC often has a lot of AMD-specific bugs and issues. This is simply due to the fact that Nvidia GPUs are more closely aligned to Nintendo’s Switch hardware. Thankfully, the Ryujinx team has managed to fix a “staggering number” of AMD-exclusive graphical bugs with a new workaround. This is thanks to a “Invocations per subgroup” fix.
One such issue showed itself in a lot of games, especially Unreal Engine titles. GPUs have a property which is usually called `Invocations per subgroup` and crucially AMD and Nvidia diverge here in their GPU designs. Nvidia uses 32 invocations per subgroup, while AMD uses 64. RDNA onwards support a Vulkan extension which allows a GPU to change its subgroup size but only for compute shaders, so while this fixed some games like Shin Megami Tensei V on modern AMD GPUs, if a game used these operations in the rest of the graphics pipeline, no dice.
The solution is to simply sub-divide the 64 into two groups of 32 instead of just ignoring any extra invocations beyond the 32nd, resulting in the mess seen above. Fixing this fixes a staggering number of AMD-exclusive graphical bugs.
Ryujinx is an incredible emulator. It’s crazy to think that this tool emulates a current-generation console. That said, it looks like Nintendo’s planning to release a Switch successor next year. This console should feature much more powerful CPU and GPU hardware, and it can reportedly run Unreal engine 5’s demanding Matrix tech demo.
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