PCSX2 PlayStation 2 emulator adds Vulkan renderer in latest build

PCSX2_1.6.0_Windows_10.png

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.

 

Desconocido90

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oh, so they stitched a vulkan renderer to the main mess. Good job!
I feel curious: Which emulator do you think is not a mess? The retroarch core? The one called "Play!"? AetherSX2? Or maybe... DamonPS2? (*heaves in malware*)

AetherSX2, the best of the list, isn't better than PCSX2, it matches it, because they share most of their code. Play! is unripe (unsurprisingly, made by a single programmer, although its HLE BIOS is an archivement). DamonPS2 is unstable buggy crap.

Face it: All emulators look like messes to you because the hardware they try to emulate is a total mess (a wonderful, yet crazy mess). that can't be translated well to modern PCs.

The code of the games is usually a similar mess, relaying in racing conditions, disk timings, undocumented HW bugs, subpixel accuracy that breaks scaling, the interlacing...

PCSX2 team, with less developers than Dolphin's, has done a quite amazing job emulating PS2... and in the last years they had done huge improvements and modernization (code clean-up, plugin merge, improved OpenGL and D11, more stable MTVU, hacks removal, QoL...) and with a lot coming soon: The 64 bits version is almost finished, they're working in a OSX port with Metal, a new QT interface...

If it's not enough for you, you can develop your own emulator.

It’s pretty weird to me that no one bothered to implement Vulkan before for the most well known PS2 emulator
  • Vulkan has some perks, but they're not enough to make it overwhelming superior and a priority for PCSX2 team.
  • Every new alternative mode means more work for devs: writing it and later maintaining. Making Vulkan as good as the other modes would take effort and time, time the team couldn't dedicate to fixing bugs or adding other kind of features.
  • They thought a decent Vulkan mode would require VK_EXT_fragment_shader_interlock, an optional extention AMD refused to implement in their drivers, so they wouldn't consider working on a Vulkan mode until AMD changed their mind. (Luckly, Stenzek found a replacement to that extension)
  • Since Vulkan is a more recent, less popular API, during the first years there weren't many devs familiarized with it.
 

ZeroFX

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I feel curious: Which emulator do you think is not a mess? The retroarch core? The one called "Play!"? AetherSX2? Or maybe... DamonPS2? (*heaves in malware*)

AetherSX2, the best of the list, isn't better than PCSX2, it matches it, because they share most of their code. Play! is unripe (unsurprisingly, made by a single programmer, although its HLE BIOS is an archivement). DamonPS2 is unstable buggy crap.

Face it: All emulators look like messes to you because the hardware they try to emulate is a total mess (a wonderful, yet crazy mess). that can't be translated well to modern PCs.

The code of the games is usually a similar mess, relaying in racing conditions, disk timings, undocumented HW bugs, subpixel accuracy that breaks scaling, the interlacing...

PCSX2 team, with less developers than Dolphin's, has done a quite amazing job emulating PS2... and in the last years they had done huge improvements and modernization (code clean-up, plugin merge, improved OpenGL and D11, more stable MTVU, hacks removal, QoL...) and with a lot coming soon: The 64 bits version is almost finished, they're working in a OSX port with Metal, a new QT interface...

If it's not enough for you, you can develop your own emulator.


  • Vulkan has some perks, but they're not enough to make it overwhelming superior and a priority for PCSX2 team.
  • Every new alternative mode means more work for devs: writing it and later maintaining. Making Vulkan as good as the other modes would take effort and time, time the team couldn't dedicate to fixing bugs or adding other kind of features.
  • They thought a decent Vulkan mode would require VK_EXT_fragment_shader_interlock, an optional extention AMD refused to implement in their drivers, so they wouldn't consider working on a Vulkan mode until AMD changed their mind. (Luckly, Stenzek found a replacement to that extension)
  • Since Vulkan is a more recent, less popular API, during the first years there weren't many devs familiarized with it.
Oh god pcsx2 fanclub team send their rep. lawyer to me. Pcsx2 being a spaghetti code mess is a joke even between the devs... so yeah I was also joking. The fact that pcsx2 has became such an object of divine adoration between some crazy fucks that you can't even joke blows my mind. Also throw those "facts" you brought into the trash, me and 90% of the forum knows all of that
To calm you down though: pcsx2 may not be the greatest emulator but achieved a lot and it is what we have, and I like it despite it's flaws. Not everything is black on white or polarized the way you think it is.
 
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Snintendog

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I mean, when you have such glorious games like Xenosaga 1 that bug out because you actually do emulate accurately, its one or the other.

PS2 is such a treasure trove of insanity that I'm not expecting to see anywhere near 100% accuracy for most of my life. FPGA or not.
yup I have 2 models of Ps2 just so i can play all my ps2 games. The damn Revisions have different game compatibility with different HW bugs that developers relied on. Its the Genesis Issue but far far more complicated and insane.
 

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