A Switch emulator now runs Mario Kart 8 Deluxe as PS5 homebrew, at about 12 fps in races

NeXium's October progress report covers 383 commits: 32-bit Switch games, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom in-game, an Android app, and a PS5 port only a few days old.

AI-drafted from 3 sources. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.

NeXium, a Nintendo Switch emulator written in Rust, has started running on the PlayStation 5. Its developer, Mythrax, wrote in the October progress report, published on 4 October, that in the last few days it "started running on a PlayStation 5". The report covers 15 July to 4 October, 383 commits, about 140 of them on the graphics side.

The PS5 port

The port is described as "only a few days old": a native homebrew app built from the same code, using Mesa's open-source RADV driver for Vulkan, with its own launcher, controller support and audio. It pages games in as they are needed because the console will not map a multi-gigabyte file in one go. Cave Story+ runs at full speed with sound, shown at 60 fps on 3 October. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe boots, its menus run at 56 to 60 fps, and races run at about 12.

The report says the PS5's GPU sits idle for most of each frame in those races. The limit is a single CPU thread that translates the game's draw commands, and each draw costs about four times as much on the PS5's processor as on the developer's desktop.

Two months of games

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is a 32-bit game, and NeXium could only run 64-bit code until 27 September, when one commit added 32-bit guests. On a desktop with an RTX 5070 Ti, the game now races at about 45 fps in handheld mode. Super Mario Odyssey reached its kingdoms, Metroid Dread and Metroid Prime Remastered got in-game, and Nintendo Switch Sports bowling works with a real Joy-Con's motion sensor. Breath of the Wild runs at about 20 fps on the Great Plateau and Tears of the Kingdom is slower; Mythrax writes, "I wouldn't call either of them playable yet." Minecraft Dungeons II reaches its menu with the wrong colours.

An Android app arrived in August. In September it gained native ARM64 execution, which the report compares to NCE in yuzu: 64-bit game code runs directly on the phone's CPU, which got Super Mario Odyssey running on a Galaxy S25 Ultra. The next round of work is speed, starting with the cost of each draw.

The project's website offers nightly builds and links its source to a self-hosted Git server rather than GitHub. That server sat behind a browser check that blocked our requests on 12 October, so we could not confirm what it holds. The project takes support through Discord and Ko-fi, and the site says it is not affiliated with Nintendo or Sony.

Sources

Image: NeXium

More news from Gaming World