We've been banging the drum for the 3DS quite a bit over the last few years, and with good reason. It's one of Nintendo's most interesting handhelds thanks to its autostereoscopic display, an amazing selection of games, and that downright lovable clamshell form factor.
One of the leading emulators in this space is Azahar, which is an Android-based app which replicates the performance of the legendary dual-screen handheld – and, when you consider the sudden influx of Android portables which possess two displays, it's easy to see why this particular emulator has been getting so much love of late.
The developers behind Azahar have been working hard recently to improve performance and streamline the user experience; for example, a recent update enabled the emulator to handle .3ds files, the most common format for 3DS emulation.
Now, another big performance boost is about to happen, as the devs behind the emulator are adding support for cached shaders (thanks, Android Authority).
If you've ever wondered why some emulators stutter when rendering 3D visuals, shaders are usually the reason. Shaders are essential for running 3D games on modern GPUs, but the need to compile them in real-time during gameplay can create performance bottlenecks.
To solve this, developers resort to 'cached' shaders – these are shaders which are rendered when a game is loaded, and this process avoids stuttering happening later on, during gameplay.
Because the 3DS uses vertex shaders, Azahar has, up to this point, had to convert them into code that will run on whatever GPU you happen to be using in your system of choice. Azahar developer PabloMK7 has confirmed that, moving forward, the emulator will use cached shaders, resulting in improved performance.