The Nintendo reimagining of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time debuted Thursday for Switch 2—and soon after, it was being played on PC through emulators. Check out what you need to know about the fast-developing emulation situation below.
On the day of release, the game was being played on PC at 15-30 FPS with noticeable visual errors. Just in one day, the Lichii emulator had sorted out most errors, and the opening scene and the Great Deku Tree were running at 60 FPS.
In one instance, a fully working 4K 60 FPS version with visible graphics without bloom effects, artefacts, or slow-motion effects was observed by one user, while only minor stutters remained.
In another emulator called Eglantine, a playable version with some texture glitching, lighting errors, and audio desync was noticed.
Who’s behind it?
Lichii is based on Eglantine, which in turn is based on Eden, Yuzu, and Sudachi. The Eglantine GitHub repository demonstrates intense activity, having two branches specifically for Ocarina pushed in a single day.
The first branch, “fix/oot-blackscreen,” was meant to fix the white flashing caused by Vulkan scheduler resetting the occlusion counter, along with shader fixes for AMD hardware and vegetation rendering.
The other branch, “oot-optimisation-fixes,” introduced pipeline caching and background-thread processing to improve performance.
How about DLSS?
YouTuber ElAnalistaDeBits showcased the injection of NVIDIA’s DLSS via HDMI to remove the shimmering that happens due to Nintendo’s implementation of FSR 1.0 in the original game.
The Switch 2 hardware is compatible with DLSS, and it is used often by third-party developers; however, Nintendo’s games, including Ocarina of Time, still use FSR 1.0 for some reason.
