A new video showing Animal Crossing: New Horizons on PC is a pretty solid indication that Nintendo Switch emulation has a long way to go. A YouTuber who focuses on testing and benchmarking games on PC has given Animal Crossing: New Horizons emulation a whirl — and it doesn’t look very good at all.
The video (posted to Reddit) starts off with the player running along the beach. Unfortunately, it looks like an episode of Baywatch — the game is running at an absolutely abysmal frame rate. Most of the time, New Horizons ran at 7–10 FPS in the game world, only jumping up to a barely acceptable 30 frames per second on the loading screen.
ALSO: This Animal Crossing checklist makes tracking progress super easy
The benchmark was run on an AMD Ryzen 5 2500U, a mobile APU with Vega 8 graphics. While it’s certainly not an amazing GPU, the level of performance reached is pretty darn bad. A quick search showed some other people having better success getting the game to run a little smoother, but it’s still pretty hit or miss.
There is also the problems that come with emulation. It’s a legal grey area at best, and using a Switch emulator requires that certain types of encryption are bypassed (which is a big no-no in most countries). It’s almost certainly illegal wherever you live and you shouldn’t try it — nevermind the fact that it probably won’t work well at all.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons on PC is a long way from working well, but PC players don’t have to be left out in the cold; check out Hokko Life instead so you can enjoy a similar town life experience without breaking the law.
