Status update from kd-11 (18-11-2021)

Hi,

It's kd-11 with another development update for RPCS3.

As usual, let us begin with a quick breakdown of the progress to RSX emulation over the past 6 weeks:

1. Fixed a shader compilation bug that caused Lego harry potter to crash at boot.

2. Improved OpenGL compatibility with old hardware. RPCS3 supports all OpenGL 4.3+ drivers now. Previously users of some older hardware like Geforce 400 series or Radeon HD6000 series would fail to run.

3. Improved support for virtual shadow cubemap sampling. This fixed shadow rendering from point lights in naughty dog games as well as other titles such as Resident Evil: Code Veronica and Dragon's Dogma. This feature is widely used in PS3 engines so many more titles were probably improved.

4. Fixed a bug affecting ZCULL updates when a page fault is handled in the middle of some specific operations. This would usually lead to loss of data and manifest to the user as graphics instability and flickering. This was especially noticeable in titles such as Ratchet & Clank All 4 One.

5. Fixed some texturing bugs that could lead to use-after-free hazards and cause all kinds of memory corruption and crashing. Improved graphics output in some titles, such as Class of Heroes 2G.

6. Fixed handling of 1D textures when pitch is not declared explicitly. This fix solved the flickery sky in Jak II and Jak III, which were the last remaining graphics glitches in those games.

7. Fixed some clipping issues when using debug overlay tools with NVIDIA GPUs.

8. Fixed the shader disassembler to allow other developers and curious users to disassemble binary shaders dumped from third-party tools.

9. Fixed a regression caused by broken texture state propagation between renderpasses. This fixed a long-standing bug with flickering geometry in Tomb Raider Trilogy and Uncharted games.

10. Fixed draw call behavior when rendering in legacy mode. The new code allows old-school glBegin()/glEnd() pairs to work as they did in OpenGL 2.1 and older which is what the PS3 supports. This fixed a lot of broken special effects in games such as Ratchet & Clank All 4 One and Into the Nexus as well as some other unexpected titles such as The Last of Us and Uncharted series.

11. Fixed a regression caused by interpolating between mismatched texture formats in blit engine. This is still unmerged but should go into main builds soon. The PR offers a stop-gap solution, the blit mechanism still needs a minor rewrite to function as intended, but that will come later when there aren't so many open bug reports.

As was stated in the last update, I have maintained the development effort on bug fixes and especially focused on regression tickets for titles that were known to work in the past but have had their behavior get worse with time. This will continue for the immediate future, as I work to bring down the large number of bug reports to a more reasonable amount.

Thank you all for your continued support,

Regards,

kd-11