Most players only needed one reason to buy the Nintendo Switch, and that reason is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. However, we shouldn't overlook the fact that it's also available for Wii U, which opens the possibility of accessing its content through emulation. With nearly a week's head start, the Cemu emulator team got to work, and the news is that preview 1.7.3 can already load Breath of the Wild, albeit with many errors.
Emulating Breath of the Wild
The latest news about the Nintendo Switch mentions dead pixels and availability issues, classic growing pains for a platform that has been on the market for less than seven days. Nintendo will need to find a way to solve these problems, or players will surely explore other options. One of them is emulation. The idea of emulating the Nintendo Switch might gain traction in the distant future, but the fact is that its current flagship title, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, has a Wii U-compatible edition, which opens the doors to the Cemu emulator. Users were quick to discover that Cemu version 1.7.2 was unable to run the game (it never got past the main menu), but the preview of build 1.7.3 does much better:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Rov1qGOqd_Y'Better' in the sense that it can go beyond the menu and run at about 10-15 frames per second on an Intel Core i7-4790K, with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 and 8GB of RAM. According to the official post on Reddit (link below), the only high-level change was a shader cache; however, the rest needs a lot of work. The game has no sound, produces physics errors, abilities that require item selection don't work, there's no water collision, and Link has no way to leave the tutorial area without a saved game.
Performance and future work
Breath of the Wild runs at 30 frames per second, so it will require several adjustments in Cemu, including game-specific hacks. While this isn't ideal for preserving hardware functionality, Cemu's priority is to provide a good experience. Another detail to keep in mind is that Breath of the Wild pushes the Wii U to its limit. Technically, the Wii U's GPU supports 16 TMUs (texture mapping units) per shader stage, but the game often uses 18, causing frame rate drops and quite long loading times. Cemu has the advantage of being able to go beyond those limits, although it will need time. Fortunately, players are supporting its development, and the Patreon profile shows nearly eight thousand dollars in monthly donations. Cemu 1.7.3 will be released on March 10.
