Wondering how the Switch emulator runs Ryujinx on iOS? Rather badly. Developer Zhuowei Zhang (to whom we owe a recent hack for change system font of iOS) installed the macOS build of the emulator on an iPhone 14 Pro. If he manages to start a game, there’s still a lot of work to do before he can comfortably play Super Mario Odyssey on his phone.
iPhone 14 Pro can barely emulate a Nintendo Switch.
It’s enough to run a 2D Unity game with some crashes.
The game is https://t.co/zuAIxcgR81D3fau4’s port of https://t.co/zUKMtNNWjh.
The emulator is Ryujinx (https://t.co/qTdwPTpHvE), wrapped to run on iOS.
Game starts at 00:47. pic.twitter.com/9WADxSV5Stβ Zhuowei Zhang (@zhuowei) January 2, 2023
In a post, the developer specifies that he has coded a prototype launcher for Ryujinx which launches an unmodified build of version 11.0 of this emulator optimized for Apple Silicon chips. We can see that he manages to start a portage of Helltaker on Switch (a 2D game under Unity) which obviously runs with some crashes. If the developer explains that he does not expect the iPhone to be able to run large 3D games in the coming months, it should be possible to launch simple titles.
Why is the iPhone 14 Pro dragging its feet like an aging Switch and its 2015 processor? Nintendo’s console only has 4 GB of RAM, compared to 6 GB for the phone. However, the emulator requires 1.5 GB more to run, not to mention that VRAM emulation and texture decompression are memory intensive. Virtual memory limitations and the absence of some Metal / MoltenVK functions on iOS are also the reasons behind this poor performance.
If the beginnings are difficult, this project remains interesting: we will wait to see the performance on an iPad M1 or M2. iOS already has many emulators like Dolphin (GameCube, Wii) ou Delta (GBA, DS) which are accessible at the price of some annoying tweaks. On Android, there is the Switch emulator Skyline of which a first alpha was released in 2019.