The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake was launched on a Nintendo Switch 2 emulator (Lichii) on PC this week. This news came as a big step for Nintendo Switch 2 emulation since it shows that it is now possible to reverse engineer the architecture of the console for a major first-party game. This hints at the possibility that the console's security might not be as robust as expected.
Early emulation shows 60 FPS on RTX 5080 despite visual glitches
For the community tracking the development of emulation, it's important to remember that this is an early step in the development process. It doesn't mean a smooth gaming experience yet.
Lichii is a Nintendo Switch 2 emulator which has seen some buzz for its early, fast progress. The official Lichii build might not run The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake, but certain forks within the community are able to run it. This is an important detail for those interested in trying out the software. It's not always going to be as easy as downloading random builds online.
The emulator's performance is highly hardware-dependent. For example, on an Intel Core i9-14900K with an ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4090, the game ran at 40 FPS in open world regions. Another run on an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 was able to produce 60 FPS (especially in the Great Deku Tree area).
The experience still feels unfinished and has many visual glitches in several parts of the game. A lot of the open world sections have a problem with the image flickering with strange artifacts or bloom rendering issues that end up breaking the image. The Great Deku Tree area, on the other hand, works fine.
This proves that there are at least some sections of the game that can run without many graphical issues. The visual bugs point to the fact that the emulator is still very early in development.
The creators of the emulator (Lichii) could face legal action. This is similar to what happened to the Yuzu emulator in the past. The developers behind Yuzu were recently forced to pay $2.4 million in damages to Nintendo.
This sets a precedent for how Nintendo will handle illegal emulation. Possible legal action could mean that it might be difficult to find working forks for those interested in trying the software.
The fact that the Great Deku Tree area runs smoothly proves the core rendering pipeline is functional. Visual artifacts in open world regions are typical for early stage emulation. This is a solid technical milestone regardless of the bugs.
Does the official Lichii build support this yet or are we forced to use community forks? I do not trust random builds from the internet. I would rather wait for a stable release.
You have to use the specific forks mentioned in the article. The official build is not ready for this game yet. You are right to be cautious about downloading random software.
It is wild to see Ocarina of Time running this fast on PC hardware. I still prefer the original N64 experience though. The emulation is just too buggy right now.