News on Cemu 1.13.0 (Patreon)

let's start with what is planned to come in the next release:

• Texture cache rework
• Homebrew support (.elf) and integrated CPU benchmark tool
• More Wiimote improvements

Additionally, there are also the usual ongoing attempts at fixing game specific bugs and compatibility.

Current estimate for the release is late July.

Texture cache rework

We'll dive into the texture cache in more detail in a dedicated Patreon post, planned to come between early to mid July. But for now lets keep it short.

What this rework will bring: Fix dozens of graphic related bugs, from random texture corruptions, to VRAM leaks to some games not displaying anything at all. Performance will remain about the same or be slightly better.

As a bonus the rewrite will also remove one of the main roadblocks for Vulkan support, because the previous texture cache was designed specifically around OpenGL and wasn't very adaptable.

Homebrew support

The next Cemu release will finally support launching homebrew .elf files.

Some of the more fancy homebrew, like Homebrew launcher, nanddumper, FTPiiu everywhere or any of the system tools, won't work in Cemu because they rely on the ARM coprocessor being present, which Cemu currently handles via HLE.

But homebrew games or anything that doesn't try to exploit the Wii U system in some way should work fine.

CPU benchmark tool 

Since there is now an easy way to run the same homebrew on Cemu and on Wii U, we felt it would be nice to have a tool to make direct comparisons. For example it would be interesting to know how Cemu compares to a real Wii U in regards to CPU performance.

For that purpose, we made a little homebrew program that runs a few CPU-heavy tasks and then prints out the duration. Here is how it currently looks. We'll release the tool (as .elf) together with it's source code soon, before the actual 1.13.0 release.