Yuzu Switch Emulator Texture Recompression Tested On Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom With Very Low VRAM

The latest builds of the Yuzu Nintendo Switch emulator introduce a setting that allows for recompression of ASTC textures that can potentially improve the emulation of games using this type of textures, including The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, on GPUs with extremely low VRAM.

A new video shared by Alexwpi Game on YouTube compares the visual and performance between uncompressed and recompressed textures on GPUs with low VRAM, such as the NVIDIA GTX 1050 and the older GTX 970. While the BC1 format doesn’t seem to bring any noticeable improvement, actually making performance worse in some cases, the BC3 format fares a little better, leading to slightly more stable performance in certain scenarios. As things stand, ASTC Texture Recompression isn’t a huge game changer, bringing only negligible improvements, but it’s still a viable option to save some VRAM and allocated RAM without any huge impact on visual quality.

Following the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, both the Yuzu and Ryujinx development teams have been hard at work updating their emulators to support the game properly. Alongside the update which introduced ASTC texture recompression, the Yuzu team released another update that fixed the pixelated shadows under objects when using the Ultrahand ability, which was one of the most annoying visual glitches of the game.

The Yuzu Nintendo Switch emulator can now be downloaded from its official website, where more information on it is also available.