After months of demand, PCSX2 has gotten itself a Vulkan renderer. The PlayStation 2 emulator primarily used OpenGL in the past, but the addition of this new renderer allows for a performance boost in some notoriously difficult-to-emulate games. It's currently available through the latest dev build--v1.7.2212--of the emulator, available to download here. This feature comes courtesy of Stenzek, known for their own emulator, Duckstation.

A lot of people were asking for a Vulkan renderer and courtesy of Stenzek (Duckstation) it is finally here! It performs better than OpenGL in a lot of cases on similar blending levels so it should make a couple of harder to run games much easier to play! Thanks Sten! pic.twitter.com/rBzyi6McrW

— PCSX2 (@PCSX2) January 8, 2022

​

 

[ZeroFX]

oh, so they stitched a vulkan renderer to the main mess. Good job!

 

[kcajjones]

I'm interested to know what performance differences there are and how it varies on different hardware.

 

[Mama Looigi]

It’s pretty weird to me that no one bothered to implement Vulkan before for the most well known PS2 emulator

 

[Jayro]

It's about damn time.

 

[omgcat]

this is great news for people with an xbox series S|X. the ps2 emulation wasn't great at all due to having to use angular for to add compatibility for the opengl backend from what i understand. once ported there could be a significant boost to PS2 emulation on SS/SX consoles.

 

[ChoChoCup]

finally my amd laptop will had a 60fps for gta 3

 

[tabzer]

Wonder how this will fare for the PS4 Linux.

 

[Cris1997XX]

It's about frickin' time. Let's try this Vulkan renderer on my shite laptop

 

[Sonic Angel Knight]

Well time to try out some stuff, gonna be a busy weekend.

 

[MissingN0pe]

Good stuff

 

[MarkDarkness]

Great to see Vulkan slowly become viable in everything.

 

[Reploid]

DX render was also always mostly alright on PCSX2

 

[Marc_LFD]

PS2 game ports were poor compared to Xbox, but playing it enhanced on PC, PS3, PS4, and someday on PS5 surely makes it hella nice.

I used to avoid PS2 ports, now it's what I want.

 

[mrcroket]

PS2 game ports were poor compared to Xbox, but playing it enhanced on PC, PS3, PS4, and someday on PS5 surely makes it hella nice.

I used to avoid PS2 ports, now it's what I want.

Still I wish that someday we have a xbox emulator with this level of polish. Third party games are almost always better on xbox.

 

[soup1]

oh, so they stitched a vulkan renderer to the main mess. Good job!

is the emulator horribly made or

 

[PatrickD85]

Neat to see PCSX2 development steps at the start of 2022.

 

[kristianity77]

Decent improvements on my setup. I can now get a locked 60 at 4k on Gran tursimo 4 which was a system killer beforehand. Also, I now get a lock in shadow of the colossus and also the original jak and daxter. Nice speed improvements.

 

[Sheimi]

I am now able to do one Surfboard level in Klonoa 2 without lag. Before I had to turn down the graphical settings for the level because it would lag. Now it doesn't have any stuttering on max settings.

 

[mrcroket]

I tested it and it works fantastic on speed side but I saw some graphics glitches on time splitter 2, this is normal because its new though.

Great job PCSX2 team and the other guy!