One of the big things everyone has been wondering about Citra is when it will be able to render games at HD resolutions. One of the great things about emulators is that they can surpass the limitations of the original console, especially when it comes to graphical fidelity. With the 3DS specifically, many beautifully detailed games are hidden behind staggeringly low resolution screens topping out at 400x240. With Texture Forwarding (from tfarley, based on yuriks early implementation), Citra can now output games at any resolution, and runs faster as well!

Welcome to the first Citra Progress Report of 2016! While 2015 will be considered the year that Citra first played games, 2016 is quickly shaping up as a year filled with higher compatibility, greater stability and much more as Citra matures. The avalanche of new features from tons of contributors has made it hard to keep up with everything even for developers! Because there have been so many changes and there are so many different games, it can be very hard to keep up with what is working and what is not.

This month we bring you the second installment of our two-part progress report on Citra in 2015! With this part, we discuss the evolution from Citra being able to barely run a few commercial games at a few frames-per-second, to where it is in 2016: Running many retail games at reasonable speeds, some of which are fully playable with near flawless graphics! We discuss Citra’s new “dyncom” CPU core, the OpenGL renderer, per-pixel lighting, and various bug fixes.