Modders are also messing with the game's code and already bringing 60 fps Tears of the Kingdom within reach. While the emulator developers themselves work on fixing bugs and understanding exactly how Tears of the Kingdom makes use of the Switch hardware, they're not the only ones tinkering with it. Ryujinx's Patreon doesn't include early builds of the emulator, but it's currently very close to the $2,500 goal, which will allow project founder gdkchan to work on development full time. Ryujinx's Patreon income has risen to nearly $2,500, from the $1,900-$2,000 range it's been hovering at all year. Yuzu, which offers exclusive early builds of the emulator via Patreon, has increased from $18,000 to more than $28,000 from 2,500 new patrons. Since May 1, both Yuzu (opens in new tab) and Ryujinx (opens in new tab) have seen a surge in Patreon backers. In the coming weeks we'll see both emulators charge forward with improvements as player interest peaks. Overall performance will no doubt increase over time, lowering the bar from the high-end systems currently required to play Tears of the Kingdom without any framerate struggles. Members of our team have already confirmed that you can play for many hours without hitting issues,' Bunnei says.

'I can say that if you're running on our recommended hardware and settings, I don't expect you to have problems. According to Bunnei, Tears of the Kingdom is VRAM hungry because it 'heavily uses a compressed image format, ASTC (opens in new tab), that is expensive to emulate on desktop GPUs.' But it shouldn't cause problems for most players, as the emulator is meant to periodically clean up the cached memory.

It's still shy of flawless, of course some players report crashing and a memory leak that causes Yuzu to gobble up more than a dozen gigabytes of VRAM. Our efforts resulted in an approximate 40% average performance increase, and it appears that this work is primarily responsible for TotK performing exceptionally well in Yuzu from the start.' 'Nevertheless, we still hedged a bet that doubling-down on improving BotW ahead of this title's release would be beneficial. 'Considering the length of time that TotK has been in development, we had expected Nintendo's BotW engine to undergo significant advancements, presenting us with a fresh set of technical challenges,' says Bunnei.

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