it's more fun to emulate

ok yeah “patching” it manually in place like that seemed to work fine

and I have now reacquired a shader cache and a graphic pack and replaced scptoolkit with ds4windows and whatnot

any idea why I can’t toggle the fence skip hack in this new version of cemu + cemuhook? is it game-specific and just not relevant outside of botw?

Cemu 1.11.0 has the new feature to take patch/DLC data and add it to the game files itself, assuming your patch data also has the meta.xml file in place

it can also play online but you have to do some arcane sorcerery involving a real Wii U sooooo (should probably clarify, when I say “play online”, I mean “connect to Nintendo’s servers and play with actual console owners”)

as far as I can tell, fence skip hack is really just for BotW and you should be able to toggle it on once a game is loaded

cool, thanks, I’m too tired to play now because my sister was here all weekend and I just did this while watching football after taking her to the airport and taking the dog for a run but it seems like I am all set up to actually play splatoon now!

I got BoTW running acceptably, in Cemu under Windows 10.

Apparently, AMD’s OpenGl pathway is shit, so things aren’t as good as I was expecting. I have a 7870. relatively speaking, not tons of power to start with. But an equivalent NVIDIA card would probably do 1080p ok in Cemu, because Nvidia’s OpenGl path is a whole lot better.

I can do 1600x900 at 30fps on the starting hilltop. 720p is 40fps with some dips to 30. That’s with all the latest versions of everything and all the latest speed tweaks.

On top of that, the shadow rendering for my 7870 is awful (I do have the AMD shadows fix applied, which makes it less awful). If you’ve ever played Devil May Cry 4 on a PS3, you are familiar with this sort of ugly. I took video of it:


*and youtube is crap, too. I uploaded that at a pristine 25Mbps. But the shadows issue isn’t exactly subtle, so you can still see it through all of the compression smearing.

My CPU and RAM situation is very good, however. (i5 7600k overclocked for a very stable 5ghz. 16gb of DDR4 3000). So, I guess the non-gpu parts of the emulation quality and smoothness, is good. And I was still able to sneak in some improvements, such as higher quality LoD, and some post processing shaders to change/improve color saturation and whatnot.

*oh and another problem with AMD’s thing is that their shader caching isn’t as good. So it takes like 3 minutes to compile shaders, before BoTW even loads. I have an SSD, too.

You’re doing this with a HD 7870!?

Yep!

I’m all fresh on setup and tweaks. So, I guess if you need some help…!

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Hrm, my performance stays pretty solid even while amidst trees and enemies.

But the wild boars, something about when they get scared, kick up dirt, and run off----freezes the game. But it doesn’t crash. It hangs for many seconds. But it comes back to normal. however, I have to look away from the boars, or it will freeze again. And each successive freeze seems longer.

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this is probably not true, sadly

bonus dumb 4k shot showing Cemu is still CPU bottlenecked in BOTW (I mean, assuming you want to be an asshole and run one of the FPS++ packs; still getting 60 FPS in shrines though):

no I’m not pulling my 290 out of its new home because I’m not doing the run around with drivers

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Well, the boar freezing is not an overclocking quirk. I tried BoTW with my system at stock ram and CPU speeds. Still freezing when the boars run and kick up dust. I also tried some other emulator settings which should be higher precision, but lower speed. and it still freezes. And two different video drivers.

I’m gonna stretch and say its likely a compatibility issue with this older videocard. But, I’m going to keep tweaking and see if I can get rid of the problem.

*indeed, the game is still CPU limited. Removing my overclock had a very noticeable affect on my minimum and average framerates.

That shot with the 760 is at 1080p rendering resolution?

I can’t remember exactly how the 760 matches up to a 7870. A 660 ti was the 7870 performance match. But anyway, that’s close enough. I don’t think I could get 34fps at 1080p.

first three shots are with the 1080p graphic pack on, yeah (I think the 4k shot has better shadows on)

I don’t think this is representative of the actual performance delta between a 470 and a 760 either, which is probably more along the lines of 40-50% and also the 760 doesn’t choke every so often for not having enough VRAM

none of what Zelda does matters because important games like Mario Kart 8 and 3D World can do 1080p fine on a 760

Yeah I dunno how the relative performance matches up, from game to game. BotW is probably more demanding than Mario Kart. Both are cross gen, too. A Switch only BoTW may have been better. I dunno.

Another issue with this 7870 is that the shader compiling doesn’t behave as expected. If you watch videos, everyone is saying that if you are really having problems with community made shader packs-----just play the game without them and let your system cache its own shaders. But that doesn’t seem to work for me. As you play around in an area, it is supposed to get smoother, pretty quickly. But my setup doesn’t seem to ever smooth out, under its own caching.

MK8 is kind of a weird example because it was ported a few years after the fact, whereas BOTW was a simultaneous release. the Switch also runs it at 1080p without issue and the Wii U version of BOTW can run worse than the Switch version, so the assumption is that neither version are optimized very well

Switch is 900p docked. I assume 1600x900, but I don’t know the horizontal res.

I just tried 1080p again and am getting better performance than expected. I must have done some tweaks since I last tried it. Probably going to Wipe Cemu and start it all fresh, now that I know the best settings. See if that squeezes anything else out.

I was referring to KM8 but the wording there is dumb so that’s understandable

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I played through botw in cemu very happily back in like April or May

framerate was decent enough at 1440p in a much earlier cemu release, I think it was 30ish most of the time? Didn’t bother me anyway. iirc the throttling did kind of break in shrines where it was a much more wobbly +/-60

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good time to have Gsync anyhow

iirc neither my CPU nor GPU were close to maxed out but that was probably constrained by Cemu’s dynarec only being single-threaded at the time

That’s cool! For me, my current framerates are fine! I am totally ok with 30fps being my low average. and I understand that people getting 90fps have 1080ti and more than 4 threads available to their CPU. and that Nvidia cards generally perform better in CEMU.

The main issues for me are the awful shadow rendering on my AMD card and the major freezing with the boars. The boars thing I could avoid, but I wonder if a similar effect might pop up later, with another creature.

Cool progress: The shadows cast by trees are a lot more stable for me, at 1080p. Running through tall grass, under trees, in the sunlight: generally looks pretty pleasing. At 720p, those same shadows are really jumpy and there is tons of shimmering and wobbling of the shadows in tall grass.

I quarter-seriously think you should install Linux and Wine and see what kind of performance the arguably better open-source AMD drivers get you there

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if you’re CPU bottlenecked at all wine is probably not going to help

Also the last time I ran Cemu in wine (which was 2016) audio was not nice