Citron’s newest version, 0.7, is not merely another small patch: it’s a fresh rearchitecture that focuses on the Nintendo Switch’s core performance bottlenecks. Featuring a rewrite from the ground up, an overhauled Vulkan rendering pipeline, and early FSR 2 upscaling support for AMD users, the Yuzu fork is a signal of the next level of performance and compatibility improvements for PCs and handhelds alike.
Why A Ground-Up Rewrite Matters
Emulators build up tech debt very quickly: layers of hacky timing hacks, shader work-arounds, and device-specific fixes that begin to bog down progress. A clean rewrite enables developers to normalize timing, memory, and GPU scheduling, eliminating hard-to-reproduce crashes and harmonizing the vendor experience. Lead developer Zephyron cites 0.7 as being a full re-architecture (accuracy first, then speed), a method that has historically paid off for projects like Dolphin and PCSX2 when they refactored their core subsystems.
Vulkan overhaul: less stalls, better pipelines
0.7’s show-stopper is its Vulkan render refactoring. Look forward to better pipeline caching, tighter descriptor management and more predictable synchronizations — technical improvements that translate into less frequent microstutters and faster shader compilation, for you and me. The fine-grained control afforded by Vulkan’s low-level API offering means that it enables lower CPU overhead and, in turn, better performance on AMD GPUs and mobile APUs where drivers can end up contributing more overhead to frame pacing.
Practically speaking, games with shader churn, such as big open-world scenes in adventure and RPG titles, will benefit most. First testers report much smoother transitions and less frame-time spikes after warming the shader caches, the same as we’ve seen adopted in other emulators once their Vulkan backends got more refined. Results will vary depending on GPU and driver, but the underlying goal is obvious: Make sure the CPU always has an opportunity to feed the GPU and the GPU is never sitting idle for long periods of time.
FSR 2 is here, but with some caveats
Citron now has an experimental FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 support. As opposed to the spatial upscaling in FSR 1, in FSR 2, temporal data and motion vectors are utilized to predict higher-resolution frames. AMD is positioning FSR 2 as a quality-first technique here that can offer significant performance uplift in titles natively (in emulation this becomes more complicated because games were not built to expose motion data in a standardized way).
The developers are upfront: This first take is “half-baked”. You’ll have to put up with some visual artifacts or ghosting, or potentially even the odd crash in some games. Still, the upside is major. If it holds, FSR 2 could potentially allow lower-power devices to push near-native-level clarity at lower internal resolutions — a tantalizing prospect for handheld PCs and compact desktops that want to leverage the libraries of the Switch.
Compatibility edge: new firmware support
Citron 0.7 supports firmware 20.4.0, making it more advanced than some competition that targets older releases. On behalf of emulation, amazing things happen when firmware is a perfect parity, like less game specific “crashes” and a smoother first run. It won’t solve every title instantly — system files, game-specific quirks and GPU drivers all remain important, obviously — but it’s a significant step for people who are still working with up-to-date, legitimately sourced system dumps.
A divided community, two quick-moving projects
When Yuzu shut down, the community spread into different forks and new attempts. Citron maintained a high pace until things got rough due to development turbulence and some of the contributors started to concentrate on a new emulator, Eden. It’s a split that can be healthy: the first pushed out quick fixes, and now Citron’s 0.7 responds with some structural improvements, and firming up the firmware. Parallel innovation is a win for users — as long as both teams keep quality control as tight as possible.
Real-world impact: Desktops, handhelds and drivers
How much faster is 0.7? There’s no universal number. It all comes down to CPU scheduling and GPU driver maturity, as well as the game. AMD RDNA powered handhelds love Vulkan; some NVIDIA desktops might also benefit, especially anywhere pipeline caching cuts down shader hitches. Linux Users using modern mesa drivers will early benefit from vulkan focused changes, and Windows Users will gain refined pipeline compile paths as usual.
The usual legal disclaimer applies: While emulation is legal in many countries, it is illegal in the US to run ROMs, unless, of course, you own the original game and have dumped it yourself. Platform Stalwarts Platform holders have taken a hard line on the distribution of copyrighted content, and projects which hold the line here are more likely to see development momentum continuing.
What to watch next
Citron’s team did some of this testing ahead of time, having put out a call to its users, but many bugs were ironed out and edge cases will emerge. You should see fast point release addresses to crash fixes, shader cache stability fixes, and more work tuning and improvements to FSR 2. If the Vulkan backend continues to get better, with more aggressive barrier scheduling, better async compilation, and better memory management, we could see some real speedups in heavy hitters where we’re currently bottlenecked by CPU-GPU synchronization.
Thus far, 0.7 reads as a start, not a finish line: a reset that trades short-term volatility for long-term growth. If the rewrite’s discipline holds, Citra could re-establish itself as one of the most influential Switch emulators in active development, pushing the scene forward toward smoother frame times, more comprehensive compatibility, and more intelligent upscaling on mainstream hardware.
