The time has finally come. After weeks of waiting, the Cemu development team has made good on their promise to release a build of their Nintendo Wii U emulator, featuring the long-awaited Vulkan renderer. The build, which was private, and Patreon-only, is now available to the public, and can be downloaded on the official site. This is a major milestone for the emulator, as Vulkan allows for much better performance for users with AMD hardware, and has been a highly-requested addition.

# Cemu detailed changelog for 1.16.0c
# Patreon release date: 2019-12-13
# Public release date: 2019-12-20

# New in 1.16.0c (public release):

general: Fixed memory searcher tool not being enabled in the menu after launching a game

gfxPack: rules.txt can now specify a filter to selectively apply the whole graphic pack only for a specific vendor (vendorFilter=<amd/intel/mesa/nvidia>) or renderer (rendererFilter=<opengl/vulkan>)

OpenGL/Vulkan: Fixed channel order for R5G5B5A1 textures (fixes colors of Luigi sprites in Super Mario 3D World)

Vulkan: Fixed a bug that could cause polygon explosions under rare circumstances

# New in 1.16.0b:

Vulkan: Fixed transform feedback on Nvidia GPUs

# New in 1.16.0:

general: Added Vulkan renderer

general: Updated shader cache
- The file name now uses the game's titleId instead of the internal RPX hash
- Added zlib compression to reduce cache file size
- Cross compatible and shared between OpenGL/Vulkan
- Remains backwards compatible with pre-1.16.0 caches
- Vulkan has an additional vendor-specific cache for Vulkan pipelines. The cache is stored at shaderCache/driver/vk/
Be aware that an incomplete pipeline cache introduces stuttering despite already having a full shader cache

gfxPack: Introduced graphic packs version 4
Adds shader replacement support for Vulkan
Any pack that has not been updated for version 4 will show up with the indicator "may not be compatible with Vulkan"
Existing version 3 packs *may* still work with Vulkan, enable them at your own risk

general: Gamelist now loads icons asynchronously
general: Added a migration assistent that will detect if DLC is installed at the legacy locations (used by Cemu 1.15.10 and earlier) and ask to move it to the correct folder
general: The graphic pack window will automatically filter for the currently running game
general: Fixed a bug where crashlogs would be omitted from log.txt because Cemu closed before the asynchronous log writer finished
general: Fixed 'dump WUD filesystem' option not dumping any files

Source

 

[bodefuceta]

I wonder how it would run on my ryzen 3200g gpu. Can't really be bothered to test as I have an actual wiiu.

 

[Jayro]

It's about damn time...

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I wonder how it would run on my ryzen 3200g gpu. Can't really be bothered to test as I have an actual wiiu.

I have a new laptop from Walmart (crappy $238 laptop with and Ryzen 3 3300U) and want to test this as well.

 

[BaamAlex]

What's Vulkan?

Vulkan is a modern cross-platform graphics and compute API currently in development by the Khronos consortium.

 

[SuperDan]

What's Vulkan?

Spock

 

[Jokey_Carrot]

*cries in fermi*

 

[SuperDan]

Looking forward to trying this out tomorrow... I tried Cemu for the 1st time this week and I was getting 45 fps steady on Zelda BOTW .... Hopefully this will give me more .. To 60 fps .... But still a Amazing Upcoming Emulator... Even though I have a hacked WIIU . I'm looking forward to checking out new Mods

 

[Essasetic]

Vulkan is a backend that allows devs to squeeze more performance out of video cards. Look at Doom 2016 OGL vs. Vulkan videos to see the difference in performance!

Except (at least for now) on Nvidia cards Vulkan performs worse than OpenGL.

 

[spotanjo3]

I wonder how it would run on my ryzen 3200g gpu. Can't really be bothered to test as I have an actual wiiu.

I know what you mean... Sometimes people have Wii U and Cemu emulator because Cemu emulator can run 4k and such that Wii U cannot be able to.

Anyway, I don't have a Wii U and don't liked Wii U but if I have it and Cemu is playing my favourite games fully speed then I would sell Wii U for more space.

 

[gohan123]

I hope cemu gets ubershaders or the kind rpcs3 is using, the stuttering the first time around is annoying. but it seems I get now 60 fps in mario kart 8 ind mario 3d land with 4k graphic pack.

 

[bowlofspiders]

I hope cemu gets ubershaders or the kind rpcs3 is using, the stuttering the first time around is annoying. but it seems I get now 60 fps in mario kart 8 ind mario 3d land with 4k graphic pack.

Vulkan is way more tolerable when you're generating your shader cache vs OpenGL. There are ways to get complete shader caches as well so you never even have to generate your own albeit it isn't exactly legal.

 

[DuoForce]

Oh cool, let me know when they go open source

 

[gohan123]

Vulkan is way more tolerable when you're generating your shader cache vs OpenGL. There are ways to get complete shader caches as well so you never even have to generate your own albeit it isn't exactly legal.

then I propably need to download new ones, the old once were outdated.

 

[BeastMode6]

I'll be curious to see how well botw runs on my r9 290 now. Currently only get about 16 fps.

Wow i thought i was the only one who was still using the 290. Damn this has been a good card, it still plays new games decently.

 

[WD_GASTER2]

I wonder how the ryzen apu will perform now.

 

[chartube12]

What's Vulkan?

Live Long and Prosper

 

[limpbiz411]

What's Vulkan?

good old vulkan death ray

you're not alone, i had to look it up myself, i thought it was star trek ralated lol

 

[Xabring]

After testing on a Ryzen 3 2300U, I can confidently say that Mario Kart passed from "downright unplayable" to " almost 60 FPS if nobody is blue-shelling you"

 

[PatrickD85]

Cemu keeps being an impressive effort to say the least!

 

[Ampersound]

That's all fine and good but WHERES METAL?

 

[TheMrIron2]

Vulkan is a relatively new graphics API like Direct3D or OpenGL. It is lower-level than Direct3D 11 and OpenGL, allowing for better access to the hardware and in theory better performance, although NVidia's drivers have notoriously been bad for Vulkan.
On the note of Cemu, this is fantastic stuff. The Wii U is a console with a small library, but lots of great picks and hidden gems, and emulating them is a blast.