Various Emulator Developers Fully Support Emulator Development on Steam Deck

GAMEFINITY.ID, Salatiga – The booming Steam Deck has made various parties start looking to optimize their games or programs for the Steam Deck. One of them is the console Emulator developers.

Since Steam Deck was announced, it is predicted that this portable PC device will be very suitable for running emulators such as Wii or Switch.

One of the contributors and developers of the Dolphin emulator named JMC4789 talk about the development of the Dolphin emulator for Steam Deck. According to him, the Dolphin developer team and contributors are very enthusiastic in welcoming the release of Steam Deck.

“Everyone I know has relatively high expectations for Steam Deck right now,” said JMC4789 in an interview with PCGamers.com.

The same thing was said by developer Yuzu, who is a Nintendo Switch emulator. According to him, the Steam Deck hardware specifications are capable of running various Nintendo Switch games using the Yuzu emulator.

“We believe that the (Steam Deck) hardware may be capable enough to run some games fairly well, and potentially run Yuzu very well with optimizations on the emulator,” explained the Yuzu development team.

Difficulties in Developing Emulators on Steam Deck

Steam Decks that use SteamOS will make it difficult to develop emulators for developers

JMC4789 also explains the difficulties in developing various emulators, especially Dolphin on Steam Deck. According to him, the main challenge in developing emulators on Steam Deck is optimization of AMD graphics drivers.

“AMD’s graphics are a bigger hurdle than the actual specs,”
“With emulation, usually people tend to focus on CPU performance, but the hidden issue is AMD’s GPU driver efficiency.” said JMC4789.

In addition, optimizing various APIs such as OpenGL and Vulkan will also be difficult considering the OS used on Steam Deck is Arch Linux-based SteamOS.

Moreover, the emulator developers experience in using the OpenGL API on AMD Graphics. According to them OpenGL development is very difficult on AMD’s graphics driver.

“Nowadays with Vulkan and D3D11/12 on Dolphin, the choice and variety of APIs is wide open. But when OpenGL was still king, AMD (graphics) was very difficult to develop,” explained JMC4789.

However, JMC4789 still believes in the various potentials that exist on the Steam Deck. He and the developer team will keep trying to bring the emulator to the Steam Deck.

“The Steam Deck’s potential is very high. The hardware sounds too good to be true. A mobile device that is basically a gaming PC? If that really happened, then that would be great.” concluded JMC4789.