In October 2019, Gizmodo published an article noting that Yuzu was able to emulate some games at a frame rate roughly on par with the actual console hardware. PC Gamer noted that the emulator was able to run Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee! shortly after the games' release, albeit with audio issues. The author of the article expressed concern with the ability of Yuzu to emulate games that were available commercially at the time. In October 2018, Kotaku published an article noting that Super Mario Odyssey was playable. In a statement to PC Gamer, the developers of Yuzu said that they were interested in potential optimizations to the emulator for use on the Steam Deck. In July 2021, Yuzu concluded the 'Project Hades', which aimed to rewrite the shader decompiler, bringing an improvement of the overall performance of the emulator. In June 2021, Fastmem support was added to early access builds of Yuzu.

In November 2020, Yuzu's developers added online functionality to the emulator but removed it shortly thereafter. On May 9, 2020, the development team announced an update that included experimental multi-core CPU emulation codenamed Prometheus. In December 2019, Yuzu added an experimental Vulkan renderer to its Early Access build and brought it over to its mainline builds.

Two years after the removal, the feature was finally readded under the codename 'Project A.R.T'. After initially adding support for beyond-native resolution, the feature was removed again due to stability issues and inconsistent behaviour on different GPU vendors shortly after. Yuzu also offers a resolution rescaling feature that simulates docked, undocked and beyond-native resolutions. The implementation will eventually be replaced with one that allows the use of local BCAT files dumped from a Nintendo Switch. This feature was later removed due to being non-functional. Yuzu used a network service called Boxcat as a replacement for Nintendo's BCAT dynamic content network. Originally, Yuzu only supported test programs and homebrew. The emulator is made by the developers of the Nintendo 3DS emulator Citra, with significant code shared between the projects. Yuzu was announced to be in development on January 14, 2018, 10 months after the release of the Nintendo Switch. Yuzu (sometimes stylized in lowercase) is a free and open-source emulator of the Nintendo Switch, developed in C++.

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