Hi,
It's kd-11 with another development update.
As most of you are aware, I had been setting up the pieces required to implement MSAA in RPCS3 for quite some time. This has culminated in the MSAA activation PR [here]. While currently only supporting a restricted version of MSAA that matches the PS3 layout, this is not the end and more flexible options will be added in the coming weeks. Many AAA games rely on MSAA for proper visuals, such as Crysis, Crysis 2, Red Dead Redemption, Killzone series, etc and indeed as you can see from the user-submitted images in that PR, visuals are indeed improving for some of these games. There are still a few regressions to iron out but things are coming along smoothly.
Some may have noticed I suddenly stopped work on the MSAA PR briefly in the past few days. This was because I was restructuring some code in the Vulkan renderer to avoid the NVIDIA driver deadlock bug we had been having since the 4xx series drivers came out. This was done by reimplementing frame submission calls. Previously rpcs3 used a fence signal and explicitly waiting and then manually submitting to the present engine with no semaphores. The idea was to control frame submission from the application instead of letting the driver do it, but this triggered a nasty deadlock with the drivers, sometimes forcing a hard reset of the system to get the windows desktop working again. This has been resolved by just doing what everyone else does and use signal semaphores in the driver instead. This path is bug-free, likely since its what is commonly used by other vulkan applications. The PR for this change can be found [here].
For now, I plan on polishing up and finishing the MSAA PR bugs then we can take a short break from adding new features and do some optimization work. I have many ideas in mind and have already gathered relevant profiling data to begin this task soon.
Thank you all for your continued support.
Regards,
kd-11