Hi,
kd-11 here with another development update.
In keeping with the cycle of big feature additions having some maintenance work in between, the past two weeks have mainly been focused on code maintenance and stability improvements. There were however a couple of pull requests that were added as part of the mipmap gathering megatask:
1. Making sure mipmap levels generated using the blit engine scaler are visible to applications.
2. Accompanying shader fixes to make Intel and AMD hardware behave similar to Nvidia hardware from the mid-2000s.
You can see the work in this two pull requests and the improvements they brought to the project [here] and [here].
As for other the other maintenance and stability fixes, these are the highlights:
1. D3D12 backend was removed. It had slowly become replaced by Vulkan and just added to the maintenance burden. This also makes it easier to work on renderer improvements on operating systems other than windows without fear of breaking this platform-specific renderer.
2. Native half-float support was improved. Depth export was restored and Vega support (using proprietary drivers only) was re-enabled.
3. Fixed some problems in decoding compressed textures due to PS3 applications not abiding by block alignment expectations.
4. Fixed some vulkan spec violations to get basic intel ANV driver support working. Some minor problem remains since they are unable to properly support anti-aliasing at the moment, but the emulator should not crash.
5. Added some more features to the overlay system. Not useful right now, but will be important for some upcoming work by other contributors.
The following maintenance tasks are scheduled for the immediate future:
1. Restructure buffer heap management so that the "working buffer not big enough" error goes away for good. In a sense, I want to have this implemented similar to how OpenGL drivers would handle it. A faux sparse allocator already exists for the DMA pool and I believe I can reuse it for this purpose.
2. Some refactoring of the decompilers in preparation for the shader interpreters.
After that we should be close to the holiday season where development focus shifts to quality-of-life improvements.
Thank you all for your continued support.
Regards,
kd-11