Nekotekina

Update from kd-11

Hi all,

It's kd-11 here with another update on RPCS3 emulation. It's been a long time since my last update and a lot has happened. I'll try to stick to the major strides just to keep everyone updated without turning the report into a changelog.

My last major update was about a year ago, during the wrap-up of the RSX detiling work. Work on that feature including optimizations and improvements continued all through the rest of 2023, interspersed with normal bugfixes and improvements...

Status update from Elad

Hi,

It's EladAsh with an update on the ongoing CELL emulation improvements in the last two months and future plans.

SPU Cache And Code Compilation Performance Enhancements:

1. New techniques have been implemented to significantly reduce bogus code compilation by analyzing SPU instruction branch validity requirements. (a theory proven by real world code observation and testing)

The theory was: although all branches are technically valid, some result in wraparound the SP...

Status update from kd-11 (26-09-2023)

Hi all,

It's kd-11 here with another RSX progress update. This one is long overdue, sorry for that, but I have some interesting updates to talk about.

My last update was about my lengthy experiments with executing SPU on GPU and coming to the conclusion that modern GPUs are still not at a level where that is a feasible approach. Once that work wrapped up, I took a short break and got right back into it. Here's a quick breakdown of all the work that went into the project since then...

Status update from Nekotekina

Hello! I'm sorry for not talking much recently. I'm also sorry for reduced amount of contributions I do for RPCS3. While I'm not completely resigning from the project, I must admit that my motivation has dropped significantly compared to the early years. I'm sorry for not talking about this so late, but the sharing of funds has changed accordingly and I'll try to give the overview for the current situation. Currently the funds are shared as following:

• kd-11 - Full-time Lead Graphi...
  2023-07-06 16:59:00 +0000 UTC View Post

Status update from kd-11 (30-04-2023)

Hi,

It's kd-11 with another update on RPCS3 emulation.

It's been an eventful 3 months since the last update. There's a lot to unpack in this update, so let's start with the general fixes and improvements.

1. Reimplemented the native overlay message queue system. This allows more consistent management of popup alerts and notifications while ingame. Animation support (fade-in, fade-out, animated icons, etc) was also added. We finally can design a comfortable ingame notificatio...

Status update from kd-11 (31-01-2023)

Hi,

It's kd-11 with another update on RSX emulation for RPCS3.

There have been a lot of improvements since the last update. For most of the tail end of 2022, I kept my focus on bugfixes and improvements to improve our game compatibility. Let's go over a quick summary.

1. Lighting fixes for OpenGL in some titles such as NFS: Rivals.

2. Fixed crashing that happened if the user tried to manually prebuild the PPU cache before starting the game.

3. Implemented 8-bit R...

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

Hi,

It's kd-11 with another update on RSX emulation for RPCS3.

As is tradition I'll begin by summarizing all the work that has gone into the emulator since my last update. The changes are listed roughly in chronological order.

1. Improved support for Intel's ANV driver in mesa. This largely affects our linux users with integrated graphics or Arc GPUs.

2. Async compute texture streaming was reworked to avoid killing performance in some titles on NVIDIA GPUs such as Kill...

Roadmap update from Nekotekina (25-07-2022)

Hello,

Sorry for not talking much. This short post will only focus on work in progress and further plans.

• Accuracy improvements in PPU/SPU. Despite its good compatibility, RPCS3 currently doesn't have accurate implementation of certain basic features of PS3 CellBE processor. This includes approximation instructions, which are lazily implemented to be "good enough" and produce different results. Inaccurate implementations may cause various bugs and incompatibilities.
2022-07-25 13:13:44 +0000 UTC View Post

Status update from kd-11 (17-07-2022)

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

It's been a long time since my last update and a lot has been done. Let's go over some of the major highlights.

1. The MSAA rewrite was completed. MSAA filtering was redone with a better algorithm that provides a nice balance between visuals and performance. It's not perfect yet, and I will revisit the implementation later, but it works well enough and at higher resolutions the difference is not observable compared to hardwa...

Status update from kd-11 (04-04-2022)

Hi,

It's kd-11 with another update on RPCS3 development. A lot of improvements have been made in the past 8 weeks. I'll review them in two separate sections with bugfixes and optimizations separate. Let's start with the list of bugfixes:

1. Fixed an out of bounds crash when running insomniac titles on the emulator. Resistance series and the Ratchet&Clank series were impacted by this issue.

2. Fixed some vulkan crashes caused by incorrect resource cleanup when exiting the...

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 t...

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 fo...

Status update from kd-11 (01-10-2021)

Hi,

It's kd-11 with another development update for RPCS3, the PS3 emulator.

A lot of progress was made in the month of September, here are the highlights:

1. Driver compatibility and support was improved, fixing graphics issues and crashes on AMD and INTEL GPU hardware.

2. Reversed and implemented indexed attribute read in shaders which fixed graphics glitches in some games.

3. Fixed crashes when running RPCS3 in a wayland session. There are other Qt shortcomings...

Status update from kd-11 (16-07-2021)

Hi,

It's kd-11 with a progress update on RSX emulation for the RPCS3 emulator.

It's been a while since the last update, and a lot has happened since then. Let us begin with a summary of the improvements made since the last update:

• 1. Fixed a bug where some optimizations made to improve performance of surface clears would fail in some corner cases and cause garbage visuals and flickering in some titles.
• 2. Implemented support for extended-length vertex programs...
  2021-08-16 19:18:23 +0000 UTC View Post

Status update from kd-11 (23-06-2021)

Hi,

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

For the past month, I have been focused on bugfixes as well as some surface cache tweaks and investigations on the side which I will explain. Let's start with some highlights:

1. Fixed performance on linux when using the RADV vulkan driver which improved performance by over 100% in some GPU-limited cases. This driver is recommended over the official AMDVLK driver by AMD. Performance now beats the windows setup in mo...

Status update from kd-11 (17-05-2021)

Hi,

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

Since my last update, I have been focused on improving the state of the RPCS3 rendering pipelines. The main focus was to try and find solutions to some long-standing problems that have plagued the emulator for years. After recovering from my earlier illness, I got to work on solving difficult to diagnose bugs. There is a theme here - many fixes are related to the surface cache or texture subsystems. This is because there ...

Status update from kd-11 (11-04-2021)

Hi,

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

Usually I start off this section with a recap of the happenings for the last month, breaking down work done and explaining how it ties in to future work. Unfortunately, this time, not much changed during the last month. Well, asynchronous texture streaming foundation code was added to the emulator, but then I disappeared for a while. As some of you are aware, that was because I contracted COVID-19 in early March and was unable to work ...

Status update from kd-11 (21-02-2021)

Hi,

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

Over the past month, I've been doing some more research on how to improve the rpcs3 texture pipeline. This work started a few weeks ago with the implementation of passthrough DMA and is still ongoing. But before I return to updates on this issue, let us begin with a quick recap of what has been happening so far:

1. Vulkan renderer saw some significant restructuring to help with maintainability. This largely just i...

Status update from Nekotekina (2021-02-14)

Hello, my friends. Another month passed, and there is still a lot of work to be done despite some progress in various areas:

• Warning fixes progress. Few warnings were enabled for GCC/clang, and the lack of return was made an error. This is one of the tools that can help to prevent serious bug in the process of development. Clang noreturn analyser demonstrated interesting behaviour, forcing to apply noreturn attribute to the destructor, which caused some problems afterwards. But no...
  2021-02-14 14:52:11 +0000 UTC View Post

Status update from kd-11 (10-01-2021)

Hi,

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

The past month has seen a mix of R&D and bugfixes going into the RSX codebase. As usual, I'll start with a quick summary of the major PRs already merged:

1. The render pipeline restructure that separated program code from general state was merged. This change avoids doing unnecessary work that has not changed between draw calls. I mentioned this during the last update as it was still in progress. Since then, s...

Status update from Nekotekina (2020-12-31)

Hello, my friends. Merry Christmas (maybe too late) and Happy New Year. This 2020 year was hard and it finally ended. And I really wished to implement some major features and polish others before it ends, but it seems that I'm out of time, so I'm writing this report. It will be simple: what has been done and what are my current plans. And of course, sorry for all these delays.

As promised in previous post, I rebased RPCS3 fork of LLVM to stable LLVM11 release.

Sadly, I failed to i...

Status update from kd-11 (2020-12-06)

Hi,

It's kd-11 with another quick update on RSX emulation progress for RPCS3.

The past month has been a month of large updates when it comes to RSX improvements. This is due to the ongoing feature sprint that I have been doimg with a view to focus on behavioural improvements rather than specific bug fixes. A brief summary of the changes from the month of November 2020:

1. Resolution scaling was rewritten. The previous algorithm was not good enough and could generate 'stretch...

Status update from kd-11 (2020-11-01)

Hi,

It's kd-11 with an RSX emulation update for the month of October 2020. 

I'd first like to apologize for the delay in releasing this update; I pushed it back by a week to try and finish the shader decompiler rewrite which is still not ready for release unfortunately.

For the month of October, a lot of time was spent doing R&D for some other planned features and updates. There were also bugfixes and some rewrites. To summarize:

• 1. RSX reservation rewri...
  2020-11-01 17:34:41 +0000 UTC View Post

Status update from Nekotekina (2020-10-31)

Hello everyone. This is my late post for October, and it will be big because I made a lot of commits. I'm extremely sorry for being late, but I was so busy with fixing last day regressions… I'm also sorry if commit links are unrelated, because there is too much information to check.

• Improve Trophy Installer robustness. This commit I made mostly for myself because I symlinked my userdata directory for backups. Relaxed paranoidal mount point locking and temporary dir creation mech...
  2020-11-01 02:30:08 +0000 UTC View Post

Status update from kd-11 (2020-09-28)

Hi,

It's kd-11 with another update on RSX emulation for the month of September 2020. 

As usual, we will begin with a short recap of the major changes that have been introduced since my last update. Here are the major highlights:

1. Support for extended range depth formats (depth-float) was added for both 16-bit and 24+8 formats. This fixed a lot of bugs with the infinity ward engine and other games that use similar techniques.

2. A regression that broke MGS4 was i...

Status update from Nekotekina (2020-09-15)

Hello, this is Ivan with a late update for August.

In my previous post I introduced GalCiv and Megamouse, and August will not be an exception because this month I shared the donation with another developer, Whatcookie.

Here is some examples of his work on RPCS3:

• https://github.com/RPCS3/rpcs3/pull/8013 and 2020-09-16 00:44:35 +0000 UTC View Post

Status update from kd-11 (2020-08-23)

Hi,

It's kd-11 with another update on RSX emulation for the month of Aug 2020.

A lot of fixes have gone into RSX code in the past 4 weeks, here are the highlights:

1. Video memory management overhaul introduced to handle memory overload scenarios. When the GPU is almost out of memory, multiple techniques are used to free up as many resources as possible allowing users to enjoy higher resolution rendering without too much impact on VRAM. This fixes crashes in games that had r...

Status update from Nekotekina (2020-07-31)

Hello!

It's been a long time since my last post so I must apologize for this delay and PPU LLVM changes I promised are still not ready at this exact moment. I took an unpaid vacation this summer, to get some rest and do some unrelated things. I joined RPCS3 many years ago in 2013 and it has been a really long story for me... But enough excuses for now.

At the end of June, I decided to send my June donation share to one of our active developers, Megamouse. He started contributing t...

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....

Status update from kd-11 (2020-06-14)

Hi,

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

A lot of progress has been made in the past 3 weeks. The initial plan as was explained in my last update is to separate bug fixes (maintenance), features (enhancements) and optimizations and focus on one of these tasks at a time. I have been doing bug fixes for the past 5-6 weeks now and it has been very rewarding in terms of finding core problems and solving them. I had planned to stop bug fixes after no ...