Hi,
kd-11 here with a quick update on the state of RSX emulation in the RPCS3 project.
It certainly has been an exciting month for all of us working on the project with Metal Gear Solid 4 going ingame unexpectedly earlier this month. Immediately after this discovery I put in a lot of time trying to get the graphical bugs sorted out as quickly as possible and while I was not able to get them all this time, the game looks somewhat correct as of now (with the exception of the excessively darkened shadows). Well, there were issues introduced by some of the changes that fixed that game and after spending a week trying to get things to work properly I had to temporarily break from that research and work on other parts of the emulator. A quick breakdown of new changes since MGS4 work is as follows:
1. A fix for emulator deadlock while using multithreaded RSX was merged. This fixes a design flaw in MTRSX that caused emulator deadlock if the game relied on moving data from GPU -> CPU.
2. Separable render target masking was implemented after debugging Jojo: All Star Battle which had missing health bars. This work also improved other games like GTA V and the Infamous series.
3. Fixed a bug in the surface cache that caused false overlap hits when scanning for textures. This fixed missing visuals in Castevania: Harmony of Despair.
4. GPU acceleration for texture decoding was implemented which does benefit games that modify data a lot on the CPU. Also should help alleviate the performance impact of Read Color/Read Depth advanced options.
5. Several miscellaneous pre-existing bugs and regressions were also fixed.
In the immediate future I plan to finish my work on re-designing DMA transport which should come with its own benefits in performance and stability. This will be followed by implementing mipmap gathering, a feature that has been in the works for a long time.
Thank you all for your continued support.
Regards,
kd-11