Hi,
kd-11 here with another RPCS3 development update.
This month I have been busy patching out old bugs and regressions, as well as polishing the DMA transport rewrites. A quick breakdown of bugfixes is as follows:
1. Cleanup of some compilation warnings and errors discovered by running static analysis tools against the codebase.
2. Fixed a bug when scanning for textures in the cache that was causing broken visuals and vulkan crashes in games. This also fixed an old regression going back to RPCS3 0.0.5.
3. Vulkan runtime was improved to allow smooth operation of games that may use buffer synchronization. Fixes flickering in games when Write Color Buffers option is enabled and also solves another batch of vulkan driver crashes.
4. Some minor shader decompiler improvements were made to both fix bugs and generate more readable SPIR-V code.
5. Texture decoding was optimized even further by batching huge compute jobs. This fixed a few crashes due to running out of pool memory.
6. Some fixes were made to the texture cache that fixed blackscreen and crashing in some games. (Idol Master)
7. Fixes to texture cache to resolve an old bug that caused the emulator to crash with a "region .is_locked" assert message.
8. Some fixes to allow old CPUs to run newer versions of RPCS3 without crashing. The same patches also allow use of SSSE3/SSE4 acceleration when using appimages compiled for an older instruction set.
In addition, the DMA rewrite was completed and successfully merged with no issues reported so far. In general it improves stability and also has a slight performance improvement in some games. See [this PR] for more information.
What next?
Well, this whole chain of commits was triggered by a series of regression reports on github. RPCS3 had slowly become more crashy as more features were added in and I needed to take the time to fix the regressions. Now I can focus on the roadmap and hopefully get mipmap gathering finished by the next patreon update.
Thank you all for your continued support.
Regards,
kd-11