March news (Patreon)

the next Cemu version is almost ready and will release early next week! Here are some of the changes you can expect:

UI game list

Cemu will finally have a game list! You can find an early work-in-progress screenshot here. Currently the list is tuned towards pure functionality but in the future we will work towards something that also is nice to look at. E.g. by including game icons.

Besides being a quick way to launch games (via double-click) the game list will also have shortcuts to open the save/update/dlc folder for a specific game.

Option to switch between conventional shaders and separable shaders

We won't dive into the technical details here as we already did that in a past patreon post.

The gist is that before Cemu 1.8.0, we used conventional shaders, aka non-separable shaders. Past Cemu 1.8.0, we started exclusively using separable shaders.

Back then, the reasons for switching to separable shaders were as following:

• Wii U uses separable shaders as well
• Lower RAM usage because less shaders need to be compiled
• Maybe lower CPU usage
• Less shader compilation stutter

But there are also downsides:

• Potentially higher GPU utilization (slower rendering)
• Might not be well supported by graphic drivers

We thought it might be interesting if users could directly compare the two, see if using conventional shaders fix any of the vendor specific issues or improves performance for GPU-bottlenecked scenarios. That's why we added back support for conventional shaders in Cemu and also added an option to toggle between the two modes. 

We took care to make sure that both modes remain compatible with existing graphic packs. Conventional shaders do use their own shader cache however.

Other noteworthy changes:

• Softlocks in Smash fixed
• Fixed some broken textures in Smash
• MH3U UI now displays correctly on AMD
• XCX boots again
• Overhauled logging (log.txt) for easier trouble-shooting
• Fixed a bug that prevented online-play to work in some circumstances