Here’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Running on Steam Deck via Yuzu, Sorta

The latest Zelda installment is out now for the Switch, and we already have some footage of Tears of the Kingdom running on Steam Deck.

The sequel to 2017’s Breath of the Wild was released today, and as covered last week, the emulation community already managed to get the game running on PC through both the Yuzu and Ryujinx emulators. Some even managed to get the title running at 60FPS. As you might expect, emulating the game is still far from perfect at point, and you’ll need quite the setup to get the most out of it. For a while now, it’s also possible to run the Yuzu emulator on Steam Deck, and from the looks of it, some PC players have now also managed to get Tears of the Kingdom running on Valve’s handheld. There’s a caveat here though as performance isn’t the best, but the user who posted footage of the game running on the handheld, mentions that he hasn’t encountered any graphical artifacts at the start of the game. According to Reddit user ‘Wildarmtin’, framerates hover around 20 to 30FPS with stock Yuzu settings, and performance is on par with Breath of the Wild on Steam Deck. For this video, the most recent Yuzu mainline version was used (version 1428).
To check out the gameplay footage, visit the Reddit post (we weren’t able to embed the video).

“Performance is hovering between 20-30fps, boots without launch mod, just played up through 1st shrine and I’ve had zero graphical artifacts, pretty much perfect graphically so far”, the user writes on Reddit. “All yuzu settings are stock, using vulkan, normal gpu accuracy. It’s performing about the same as BOTW.

As covered yesterday, the Yuzu team managed to greatly boost the performance of the emulator on major titles by rewriting the old buffer cache. This has resulted in performance boosts of up to 87% on normal GPU accuracy for both high-end rigs and lower-end APUs.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is available globally now for the Nintendo Switch. Here’s what we wrote about the sequel in our launch review:

“And hey, it’s not like I didn’t play a ton of Tears of the Kingdom”, Nathan Birch wrote in his review. “My Switch gameplay log says I’ve devoted over 60 hours to TotK and I’m sure to sink even more hours into the game, even if I don’t tackle it with quite the rabid enthusiasm at BotW before it. Any concerns that Tears of the Kingdom is merely “Breath of the Wild DLC” is misplaced as Nintendo is offering multiple full AAA games worth of new things to do. There are easily hundreds of hours of content for those who want to explore every nook and cranny of the revamped Hyrule, I’m just not sure everyone’s going to have the stamina reserves for another full tour.”