Ocarina of Time Remake Hits 60 FPS on PC — Not on Your Handheld

Twenty to thirty frames per second, aggressive flickering, stutter every time Link walked into a new room. That was the Ocarina of Time remake on PC within hours of its November 5 Switch 2 launch, running through the Lichii emulator on a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, 64GB of RAM and an RTX 4080. Twelve hours later, the same setup was reportedly climbing between 30 and 60 FPS — with the flickering and stutter still very much present.

That trajectory is genuinely impressive for half a day of work by an open-source project that describes itself on GitHub as a “VERY experimental Nintendo Switch 2 emulator.” It’s also completely irrelevant to anyone reading this on a handheld. The rig in those videos costs more than a used car, and it still can’t deliver a clean frame. Before you start imagining Ocarina of Time on your Steam Deck, do the hardware math.

A 9800X3D Can’t Fix ARM-on-x86 Translation Overhead

The number everyone is quoting is 60 FPS, but read the footage description instead of the headline: the second video runs “between 30–60 fps during gameplay, albeit with some persistent flickering and stutters throughout.” That’s not 60. That’s a ceiling hit occasionally on a desktop CPU with eight Zen 4 cores boosting past 5GHz and an RTX 4080 doing the graphics work. The separate akakevinvro clip claiming a steady 60 is one data point, unverified, on unspecified hardware.

The underlying problem isn’t brute force — it’s architecture. Switch 2 software is compiled for an Arm handheld with a fixed, tightly integrated GPU. Lichii has to translate that instruction stream in real time on x86 while reconstructing graphics behavior the original hardware handles natively. Emulator teams can shave enormous overhead off early builds, which is exactly what happened here, but the floor is set by translation cost, not by how fast your chip is.

Your ROG Ally Has Roughly a Fifth of That CPU Budget

Steam Deck runs a quad-core Zen 2 APU at 15 watts. The ROG Ally’s Z1 Extreme is meaningfully quicker, but it’s still a low-power mobile chip sharing a thermal envelope with its own GPU. Valve hasn’t disclosed anything about Switch 2 emulation on Deck, Lichii’s developers have published no handheld PC support notes, and there is no benchmark data — so let’s be honest that the numbers don’t exist yet. But we do have a precedent: Switch 1 emulation of Tears of the Kingdom on Deck took months of community tuning, custom shader caches and sacrifices to reach a wobbly 30. Switch 2 software is a heavier target with a far less mature emulator.

Where this matters most is expectations. The handheld PC community has spent three years learning that “it runs on PC” almost never means “it runs on Deck” — a distinction GTA 6 is about to make painfully clear — and double-ARM-translation scenarios like this are the worst case. If Lichii ever boots a retail game on an Ally, expect single-digit to low-teens frame rates and constant shader compilation hitching before anything resembling playable.

Nintendo Settled With Yuzu Once — It Will Do It Again

The technical ceiling isn’t even the binding constraint. Lichii’s GitHub page openly compares itself to Yuzu, the emulator whose developers settled a legal dispute with Nintendo of America and shut down development in 2024. Suyu, the successor project, is defunct. Nintendo’s enforcement record is not ambiguous, and a project that gets Ocarina of Time running within 24 hours of launch — with a dump reportedly circulating a day early — is precisely the kind of target that draws a letter rather than a conversation. Plan on Lichii being a snapshot of progress rather than a supported platform, and treat any build you find as archival.

Which leaves the practical answer for handheld players: play it natively. The Switch 2 version — the one that finally buries the original’s 20 FPS curse — is what the emulator crowd is benchmarking against, and it runs on hardware designed for it, on a screen that’s already in your bag. If what you actually want is Ocarina of Time on the go, buying the game costs less than the GPU in those YouTube videos. If what you want is a legally durable way to play it on a handheld PC, there isn’t one — and no amount of emulator progress in a 12-hour window changes that.