Info about CEMU 1.6.1 (Patreon)

1.6.1 will release next week Saturday. As usual the update will be available to 5$ Patrons first and a week later for everyone else.

Here is a preview of the most significant changes:

Amiibo support

1.6.1 adds support for Amiibo functionality. In CEMU, 'touching' an Amiibo to the GamePad will be done by loading an NFC file via the menu. Since we can't bundle Amiibo files with CEMU due to potential copyright issues it's up to the users to acquire the files on their own. Our recommendation is to use a tool like N2 Elite/Amiiqo for Android to dump Amiibos.

On a side note, it's not clear if we will have enough time to add support for every Amiibo capability until 1.6.1 releases. Currently, the plan is to have at least basic read-only support for Amiibos in 1.6.1. More advanced Amiibo features (like writing data back to the Amiibo) might have to wait until 1.6.2 or later.

Optimizations for the graphics backend

We are currently in the process of optimizing the most common performance bottlenecks in CEMU's graphics backend. This is a long winded task and we will continue to work on optimizations for the next several releases. In 1.6.1 you should already see the first improvements.

(The following part is a bit more technical!)

Back in release 1.4.1 we introduced something we called 'Experimental vertex data cache'.  The purpose of this feature was to cache attribute data (alias vertex data) in GPU memory over multiple draw calls. This lead to a major speed boost as CEMU no longer had to transfer several hundred megabytes of data from RAM to VRAM for every single frame. Yet, for many games the upload data rate remained a major performance bottleneck since the cache wasn't efficient enough and there where other types of data that weren't cached at all.

Starting with 1.6.1 we have made several improvements to the vertex cache. Most significantly, we will now cache data across multiple frames instead of just for a few draw calls. If nothing in the scene changes, then no data is actually uploaded to the GPU. We also extended the cache to be more universal and include uniform and index data. Overall, we managed to further reduce the upload bandwidth by 80-95% on average. Whether this will result in speed ups or not will depend on the emulated game and the hardware setup that CEMU is running on.

Other changes

As usual there will also be various bugfixes and other minor changes. There will be no compatibility improvements however.