Curtis Joe / Android Authority
TL;DR
- The popular Yuzu Nintendo Switch emulator has now arrived on Android.
- The emulator supports plenty of games, but requires relatively high-end Snapdragon devices.
Skyline is the most popular Nintendo Switch emulator for Android, but the developers decided to abandon the project due to apparent legal trouble. Two of the developers decided to work on a follow-up emulator, but a new Switch emulator has already arrived on Android to fill the void.
The popular Yuzu emulator on PC has now landed on Android, the developers announced in a blog post (h/t: r/Android). The app can be downloaded via the Play Store in both free and paid early access versions.
The developers added that Yuzu for Android doesn’t have feature parity with the PC version right now, so functions like multiplayer over LAN and input profiles aren’t available yet.
Instead, the team will be concentrating on the basics at first:
For now, we want to focus on compatibility and performance as performing cutting-edge emulation on typical Android hardware has several challenges.
What about system requirements?
The developers also outlined minimum requirements for the game, noting that the emulator currently requires Android 11 or later and a Snapdragon processor with an Adreno GPU.
“Devices powered by SoCs like Exynos, MediaTek, etc. are expected to not work at all due to their ‘worse-than-Adreno’ GPU drivers, at least for the near future,” they explained, adding that fairly high-end devices with lots of RAM work best (e.g. Snapdragon 865 with 8GB of RAM), but that 6GB of RAM was the bare minimum.
The Yuzu team also notes that Snapdragon chipsets with Adreno 600 series GPUs offer the best compatibility, while Adreno 700 series GPUs found on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and Gen 2 deliver the best performance. This is due to open-source Turnip graphics drivers being available on older flagship Snapdragon chipsets but not on newer SoCs just yet. You can check out the performance breakdown below.
Got a Galaxy S22 series phone with an Exynos 2200 chipset? Yuzu for Android might work well here owing to the AMD GPU, but the team hasn’t been able to test the emulator on an Exynos 2200 phone just yet.
Have you emulated Switch games on Android before?
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Nevertheless, the Play Store page notes that the emulator supports “thousands of games.” Although we’re guessing that this varies in terms of compatibility. Other notable features include resolution scaling, texture filtering options, and mod support.
Either way, you’ll want to own these games if you intend to emulate them, especially as the emulator requires your console’s game keys to function.
