Hi,
It's kd-11 with another development update.
First, I'd like to quickly mention that the last part of the TLOU improvement patches was merged two weeks ago, removing the excessive flickering on the screen with random colors and rainbow noise effects. This was just the last commit in a longer sequence which had already been merged, making the results immediately obvious. We continue to work to improve compatibility of games running on that particular engine, but a lot remains to be done.
The past fortnight has been heavily focused on zcull optimization research and minor cleanup. The zcull unit is a kind of statistics generator for the PS3. It is used primarily to generate culling statistics, but there is an unfortunate side-effect of its register interface. Due to some registers being reused for more than one purpose, when zcull statistics gethering is enabled, the hardware timestamps (which are easy and fast to generate) must also contain the occlusion information (which is slow to generate). This means that while occlusion is active, all timestamp become occlusion requests and some games can easily make hundreds of timestamp requests per frame. There are also engines that request all of this data but only use it for conditional rendering. As such I have been trying to rework this whole structure to make performance not take too big of a hit whenever we need to stream this required information from the GPU to CPU memory. After several failed experiments that took up a ton of time, I finally found two viable solutions to the problem and they stack, meaning their benefits complement each other. Preparing this work for upstreaming is still the primary focus right now. More information will be made available in the near future.
While I have not made much progress in the oldest pending task (shader interpreters), I'm somewhat optimistic that I may have some basics working before the end of the year. This work was partly already done by RPCS3's founder DH and would be nice to have.
Thank you all for your continued support.
Regards,
kd-11