Introducing Support for In-Game Videos (NVDEC)

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We are excited to announce that Ryujinx now supports an important feature previously absent from Switch emulation: in-game video cut-scenes, made possible with NVDEC emulation.

Gone are the days of staring at a black screen and spamming controller buttons in the hopes of skipping ahead to the game. Whether it's a story-driven cut-scene revealing a major plot twist or a fun intro splash animation, the next level of immersion is finally here!

So, what is NVDEC?

NVDEC is a feature in NVIDIA graphics cards that offloads video decoding tasks from the CPU. As the Switch is powered by the NVIDIA Tegra X1 SoC, NVDEC is the component tapped for nearly all full motion video cut-scenes. While NVDEC is a hardware-decode feature in the Switch, Ryujinx currently emulates this functionality by utilizing software decoders for playback. There are a few hurdles preventing a full hardware-accelerated decode implementation in Ryujinx, but we are aggressively pursuing all available options to optimize performance & compatibility of this feature.

How well does it work?

Ryujinx renders nearly all in-game videos with this update, to varying degrees of performance. Support for this feature should be considered preliminary, and it will remain a work in progress (WIP) as we improve our implementation. Some cut-scenes may play back very slowly due to an audio issue with Unity games that is under investigation; a fix should be released in the very near future.

We're always after new contributors, so if you have some experience with C#, or would like to contribute to the project in other ways, feel free to get in contact with the development team on our Discord.

We hope you enjoy this new feature; your continued support is greatly appreciated! If you like what you see here, and would like to help the Ryujinx Team develop new features like this more often, consider supporting the project on Patreon.