Status update from kd-11 (03-02-2022)

Hi,

It's kd-11 with an update for RSX emulation in the RPCS3 project. After a brief hiatus in December for the holidays, work has resumed, with a focus on improving the user experience. A lot of work has gone into RPCS3 in the past 2 months. Let's go over the main highlights:
1. Fixed a 3D texturing regression that broke smoke and other visual effects in some titles such as the Motorstorm series.
2. Fixed vertex program preprocessing which allows some poorly constructed shaders to work as they would on a PS3. This does improve visuals in some titles, such as Ninja Gaiden.
3. Removed a long-standing workaround regarding Z clipping that broke shadow rendering in Deadly Premonition. This issue is only partly fixed due to the different precision on PS3.
4. Fixed a few issues in the texture and surface cache that allowed Blitz: The League II to move from intro to ingame.
5. Improved MSAA compatibility for all GPUs byb making use of shading rate control features.
6. Fixed XRGB8 format remapping which fixed broken SSAO in watchdogs. This moves the game much closer to playable as it is mostly visually coherent now.
7. Added a workaroud for NVIDIA hardware needed because of different 8-bit rounding precision compared to PS3 ROP
8. Several PRs have been made to improve OpenGL compatibility. We are now compatible with all OpenGL 4.3 GPUs and OpenGL rendering quality has improved drastically.
8. Many PRs have been made to improve vulkan stability, especially to fix the VK_ERROR_DEVICE_LOST crashes that have been common the past few months. This is ongoing work, we've already had 9 major fixes toward this goal and more are still coming.

So, what else is being worked on right now?
1. Well, a while back, I had implemented asynchronous compute support to improve GPU utilization in games where texture streaming is a bottleneck. Unfortunatley, the approach I had chosen was not compliant with the vulkan spec and a few months ago, with the release of NVIDIA driver 470, this feature was disabled for causing PCs to hang, sometimes requiring a full reboot. I have revisited this task and made it spec compliant. Fortunately driver support has improved enough in the past 2 years that we can now implement it the right way without much performance penalty.
2. Vulkan 1.3 was released recently and provides a simpler, more traditional way to render that can give us a boost in CPU performance. I'll be adding support in coming weeks, hopefully I'll have some results by the next update.

Thank you all for your continued support.

Regards,
kd-11