Watch Metroid Dread running on PC thanks to emulators

News
By Jody Macgregor
published

Here's how it looks at 4K.

Metroid Dread has only just released on Nintendo Switch and it's already fully playable from start to finish in two different Switch emulators on PC. The Yuzu emulator, which displays games in their native resolution, seems to run Metroid Dread smoothly, while some players using the Ryujinx emulator, which lets you increase the resolution, are reporting stutters. 

YouTuber Gaminja captured footage of Metroid Dread running on a PC with a 6GB GTX 1060, an Intel Core i5-8400 processor, and 16GB of DDR4 RAM in both the Yuzu and Ryujinx emulators if you want to see a comparison.

Metroid Dread has been well-received so far. A direct sequel to 2002's Metroid Fusion, it's a return to (mostly) 2D backtracking, but with a few modern quality-of-life features and apparently a decent amount of checkpoints. 

It's not like we're starved for Metroidvanias on PC given the existence of Hollow Knight, Axiom Verge and Axiom Verge 2, Ori and the Blind Forest, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, and the recently released Grime, but if you try playing Metroid Dread on Switch and find the controls cramp your hands, or you really want to tinker with the resolution and unlock the framerate, it's nice to be able to, er, switch to PC.

Jody Macgregor
Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

See comments