For those who love emulation, you might want to know about Citra [Official Site], a work in progress Nintendo 3DS emulator that we've never written about here before. It seems they've been hard at work too!

Unlike the Dolphin emulator for the GameCube and the Wii, Citra is not currently moving towards Vulkan. Instead, they've poured a lot of work into their current OpenGL renderer to improve performance and fix rendering issues and from what they've shown, it's getting quite impressive.

They've said that the new update is giving approximately 2x speed performance boost tested across various hardware configurations. Now, Citra will do the entire GPU emulation on the host GPU instead of the CPU.

On top of that, they've also rewritten texture forwarding support (to avoid a costly synchronization of textures between emulated 3DS memory and the host GPU memory) which not only increases the performance of many games, it also fixes some issue when upscaling the rendering to improve the actual look of the game like this example:

Then they showed off a few charts to show the improvement, like this one which shows just how much performance has improved.

Those are some huge gains and it sounds like it was quite a lot of effort, especially with OpenGL drivers varying across Linux, Mac and Windows in terms of performance and OS-specific issues. They've also been dealing with cases where the OpenGL documentation isn't great with ambiguous wording. That's a complaint I've heard a few times, which is why there's been such a big focus on good documentation for Vulkan.

You can read about the update on the official blog post here.

I'm now following their RSS feed, so I will hopefully be able to keep you up to date on their progress as it comes in.

Thanks for the tip, MaCroX95!