PC owners who have no money for the Nintendo Switch are in luck, as they will be able to play "Zelda: Breath of the Wild," the handheld console's best offering, with even better performance than its home platform.
All this is thanks to a Switch emulator called CEMU, which is now on version 1.11.3. It PC-based emulator can run "Breath of the Wild" at a reportedly solid 60 frames per second (FPS) in full high-definition (FHD) or 1080p or even 4K. This was made possible with the new function of CEMU v1.11.3, which takes advantage of multi-core central processing units (CPU) common in today's PCs.
A user video shows the capability of the emulator in handling the game much more smoothly than in its handheld console counterpart. It was uploaded by a user named beatlep and is shown having Spanish text, meaning the emulator also allows for multiple localizations of the game apart from Japanese or English.
It is worth noting, however, that in order to replicate the same level of performance shown in the video, players will need top-of-the-line hardware like the one the uploader used. These include an i7 Intel Coffee Lake processor and a GTX 1080 Ti from NVIDIA. Both of these are not exactly affordable for the average consumer, but for lower resolutions, lesser specifications will be more manageable.
A disclaimer is in order though, as version 1.11.3 of CEMU is currently only available for Patreon donators who have contributed finances to the third-party developer of the emulator. That said, it will be released once it is ready for public use. Otherwise, free users will have to make do with the earlier 1.11.2 version of CEMU.
The advantage that "Breath of the Wild" on the CEMU has on the Switch version is, of course, the bigger screen of the PC. Apart from that, PCs having better hardware are also capable of running the game on resolutions higher than the native 720p of the Switch, with a frame rate that can exceed 30 FPS depending on the hardware.
A guide is available online on how to bring "Breath of the Wild" to the PC, though it may require intermediate knowledge in software installation.
