Status update from kd-11 (2020-07-19)

Hi,

It's kd-11 with another update for RSX emulation in the RPCS3 emulator.

It has been about one month since my previous update, and I have continued to push out bug fixes for both rendering and stability problems from the renderers. A lot has gone into the official releases since the last update. A quick summary is as follows:

1. Fixed mipmap gathering which resolves broken crowds in GT5 as well as random vulkan crashes in the same title with VK_ERROR_DEVICE_LOST.

2. Fixed format conversion operations for RG8 formats which solves lighting in puppeteer and other games.

3. Fixed a rare vulkan crash in GT6 especially prevalent on linux due to subpixel scaling causing texture dimensions of 0.

4. Fixed colormask for some rare formats such as ABGR8 which solves rendering in Blade Arcus vs Shining Ex.

5. Fixed blend factor decoding to match real hardware which made many games that previously crashed with invalid blend control registers e.g Armored Core 4, Borderlands: The Presequel, etc

6. Fixed some rendering glitches caused by incorrect handling of invalid floats. They are now flushed to zero for all vendors while previously this workaround was only used on NVIDIA cards. This fixes some rendering inaccuracies in games like Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 when using AMD or INTEL GPUs.

7. Fixed support for newer Turing cards (Super series) which were experiencing random vulkan crashes. This was largely a matter of adding the newer chip IDs to the registry.

8. Added a workaround for older GCN cards (pre-polaris) for the already known hardware bug regarding primitive restart. This solves vertex explosions in Sonic Unleashed that was restricted to GCN1 and GCN2 cards.

9. Improved ZCULL synchronization to solve a verification crash that happened in a handful of games such as Spec Ops: The Line and Conan.

10. Fixed a crash in RE6 and GT5 caused by out of bounds memory access on textures caused by incorrect calculations on texture transfer regions when performing gathering.

11. Fixed image instability when using vulkan by managing memory barriers correctly. This was especially exaggerated after the renderpass scope rewrite that gave improved performance some months back where some games would get flickering or minor graphics corruption around ingame lights.

12. Added support for incomplete or wrongly declared texture regions. This fixed rendering of videos in Killzone HD.

13. Added detection of depth bounds testing which fixed broken shadows in Heavenly Sword.

14. Fixed FIFO command reordering which solves a rendering glitch in the original Ratchet & Clank trilogy of games.

15. Fixed a regression caused by incorrect handling of WCB that broke rendering in Macross 30.

The list of games fixed is not comprehensive and fixes are mostly only validated against games mentioned in the ticket being worked on. There are still just over a dozen main issues left to fix before this maintenance sprint is completed. I will update you with the roadmap for feature implementation at the next progress update. For now, I will keep working on the RSX bugs reported.

Thank you all for your continued support.

Regards,

kd-11