MVG - The best emulators of 2025
- Thread starter winjer
- Start date
IbizaPocholo
NeoGAFs Kent Brockman
Bernkastel
Ask me about my fanboy energy!
Xenia is a shitty emulator. It can't play many games stuck in 360 like Dead or Alive Xtreme 2. Xemu should get the honorable mention instead.
adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
A list of best video game emulators without mentioning Dolphin seems blasphemy.
willothedog
Member
nope eden+citron play everything I throw at them.
kevboard
Member
dolphin didn't really get any major improvements lately. I think he's mostly showing emulators that made big jumps this year.
otherwise if we solely go by compatibility and accuracy he'd need to add Mesen and stuff... which would make for a boring video lol
analog_future
Resident Crybaby
Kind of a boring year in emulation IMO.
PS2/GameCube and older emulation is in a pretty stable spot so not much has changed there.
RPCS3 and ShadPS4 have not advanced at the rate that I think many were hoping.
Xenia and Xemu have been quite stagnant.
Switch emulators have been very scattershot now that Nintendo has laid down the DMCA hammer.
PS2/GameCube and older emulation is in a pretty stable spot so not much has changed there.
RPCS3 and ShadPS4 have not advanced at the rate that I think many were hoping.
Xenia and Xemu have been quite stagnant.
Switch emulators have been very scattershot now that Nintendo has laid down the DMCA hammer.
Wolzard
Member
In the case of RPCS3, the developers spent a good few months struggling with the garbage that was Microsoft's compiler.
KuraiShidosha
Member
Agreed on all fronts. I used to love checking into the emulation subreddit, it was so exciting to see progress all over the place in various systems. Now the board is so stagnant that entire weeks go by without so much as a single emulator update post. I don't know what happened but the scene is well and truly dead. No disrespect to any developer out there working on it right now, but yeah. It's depressing to see.
Bradamante3D
Member
I've been using the final builds of Ryujinx on multiple classes of hardware, even on an older Windows PC with only a Radeon 580 the emulation works fine. It's a shame the Mac version never got good, though.
Odinnii
Member
I dont know much about Xenia's history but I have been using Xemu for a couple of months now and it gotten a lot better, especially after adding vulkan support.
adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
That makes some sense I guess, Dolphin has been in a fantastic state for years.
Though I guess we can say the same for PCSX2 for most cases. It has become a lot better since they added Vulken but that's been a few years now too. I guess full texture replacement is more recent.
Holammer
Member
IMO, it made a complete recovery and looking good with Ryujinx & Citron being very strong. All emulators now support recent firmware and most games just work.
A lot of competition in the space is driving development.
Durin
Member
The only major standouts for me this year have been the gains on Android for various emulators, especially PC emulation on android via stuff like GameHub. Seeing people play Hades 2 on the Ayn Thor just made me excited that pocket-able devices that can run my PC library + emulation are looking very viable soon.
Agreed. Never had a good time with Xenia. Xemu is at least decent, even though it hasn't had huge improvements for a while.
Progress has been pretty slow since Nintendo killed yuzu, but you have Citron and Eden chugging along...but most of it is just improving Android performance for Switch games.
Durin
Member
Only thing I really want at this point is for PCSX2 to fix the car texture corruption issues on Ridge Racer V. Best game in the series, but the only fix is using software rendering which brings it down to literal PS2 base resolution.
I haven't followed RCPS3 last year - but current state blew my expectations tbh.
The PS3 games I was interested run - handheld, at up to 2x the framerate and (at least) 4x resolution at 7-10Watts. It runs circles around anything other I tried to emulate so far for performance.
Hell - PCSX2/Dolphin wish they were half as efficient (15W is the sweet spot for most GC/PS2 games, and there's plenty that need 25+ with maxxed out CPU) - not to mention PCSX2, for all the progress made since last year in compatibility, still has that god awful input lag. It's painful when you see HotShots Golf 4 finally running so well and looking great, but then you try to play it and... eugggh....