[jjjfloyd]

Hey iCatButler,

(I have not posted here in forever, just recovered my password in order to make this post)

Just wanted to say what you've accomplished here is pretty amazing! These are the emulation enhancements that I find most useful - removing limitations of the original hardware (like removing sprite limit for NES). By removing texture warping and jitter, we don't really lose any authenticity, and we gain huge amounts of image quality (probably seeing the art the way the original PSX artists envisioned it) - it's win/win in my opinion.

Anyway, I read most of the old thread and I would like to add my voice to the calls that you try to adapt this tech to Mednafen PSX in Retroarch. This is the PSX emulator with by far the greatest current development, compatibility and frankly, future prospects. Also, it doesn't use a plugin architecture which for me is a huge plus (which plugin to use? which settings? no need to stress).

Regardless of what path you take with the future of PGXP, thanks for all your hard work!

 

[jjjfloyd]

Hey cool video!

OT: What did you figure out to force VP9 encodes? On my uploads, it seems random. It looks soooo much better though.

Spent a few days working out the best way to get YouTube to deliver my videos in VP9 so the unfiltered textures and 60 fps stay pristine. Here's a Tekken 3 sample:

VP9 may or may not be switched on by the time you're seeing this.

 

[jjjfloyd]

How do I bring up the debug interface that shows everything color-coded according to whether it's hi-res or lo-res? And can you explain the colors etc. again? I think this info was in the old thread but I can't find it now.

Is culling automatically enabled with PGXP? I don't see any options related to culling.

What does caching vertices do?

 

[jjjfloyd]

My understanding was that PGXP required Pete's Opengl2 2.9? Anyway it doesn't seem like F11 does anything.

When using OpenGL 1.78, press F11 to cycle through 3 styles of debugging modes.

 

[jjjfloyd]

Here is the Vagrant Story intro in 1080p... I remember the graphics blowing me away back in 2000. Still a very cool intro and PGXP does quite well here. There are some glitches here and there but I'm not sure if that is a PCSXR issue or a PGXP issue.

Here is a "before" video:

 

[jjjfloyd]

Thanks for the reply iCatButler. Two issues:

F11 does nothing for me regardless of whether I'm using Opengl 2.9 or 1.78.

Secondly, I do not seem to have any PGXP effect using 1.78. It's very jittery no matter how I configure the PGXP panel. What am I doing wrong?

 

[jjjfloyd]

I downloaded your latest version and copied the plugins over again - and you are correct all is working now F11 works as well.

BTW my overall impression is that Vagrant Story benefits from this a lot. One question: is the end goal to have the entire game as 'blue' in the debug view? Or is it inevitable that some parts of games will be red? Should we report parts of games that are red?

It sounds like you're not using the version of the 1.78 plugin from the WIP build, maybe it didn't copy across properly. While it requires special versions of both executable and plugins for all the features to work it won't completely fail if they're mixed with normal versions.

Can you try copying the new version into the plugins folder and making sure the configuration is pointing to the right folder.

 

[jjjfloyd]

Awesome news seeing the co-operation with mednafen on Github!

 

[jjjfloyd]

Wow that is so awesome! Looking forward to testing this. I'm guessing this is not yet in the current build?

 

[jjjfloyd]

Software mednafen/retroarch is the most accurate and stable PSX emulator IMO. 4x upscaling is very intensive though. Most people will have to settle for 2x.

Opengl is a work-in-progress. It is not nearly finished. So rather than busted I'd use the word 'incomplete'. And that is prior to integrating something as complex as PGXP. So it could take some time for Opengl + PGXP to be as stable as software but development is proceeding quite quickly (check the github commits if you are curious).

 

[jjjfloyd]

Just FYI I have a i5-3750k running at 4.1ghz and 4x upscaling in software mednafen is not a stable 60fps for me. So I wouldn't upgrade just to play at higher upscaling. Well, I mean go ahead but it will likely require some insane CPU power like a Skylake i7.

No offense taken, just wanted to clarify the current state of mednafen retroarch since lots of people will be transitioning from PCSXR and should know the exact state of development.

Yea for sure it is super stable, also CPU overclock and widescreen hack display properly with King's Field. I think I'm just going to bite the bullet and upgrade my computer as I've been dawdling on it for awhile.

Also, please forgive my use of wording. I didn't mean to come across as a blowhard haha. I was more wondering if I was doing something wrong rather than mednafen's opengl implementation not working correctly.

 

[jjjfloyd]

Honestly most emulators do not use more than 2 cores so for most stuff fancy CPUs like i7 is total overkill, as is dual-CPU. If I had to build a new system on a budget that mostly was used for emulation certainly you could get by with a used i3 probably for under $100. I would not consider AMD CPUs for emulation though. Well, maybe when Zen is released.

 

[jjjfloyd]

Mednafen HW core (Retroarch) only has "PGXP" implemented to it, since its OpenGL development is different from Pete'sOGL/Tweaks development. Shaders, filters and other visual enhancements are exclusive to Retroarch, and PGXP was included pretty much "as is", without much in the way of optimizations for the core. OpenGL for Mednafen also isn't very good compared to Pete'sOGL2 2.9 (even if Pete's plugin is "ancient", and needs the Tweaks for extra enhancements), so glitches are even more common on that core. You can also change the api to Vulkan there, but I don't know how it's performing, since my GPU does not support that. Sadly, PGXP can't be implemented into software mode.

I'm really surprised that you found more glitches in Mednafen than Pete's plugin. In my experience it's ran everything almost flawlessly.

Vulkan speed is insane. In software mode I cannot go higher than 2x (maintaining 60fps) internal resolution. In OpenGL I believe 4x is mostly ok but slowdown here and there. In Vulkan 8x is perfectly smooth (this should be about 2048x1792 internal res). I have a AMD R9 290 GPU and i5-3570k CPU.

 

[jjjfloyd]

I have not noticed anything wrong with Dolphin frametimes. Is this documented as an issue somewhere because that's the first I've heard of it? I've played 30+ hours of Mario Galaxy 2 with my daughter in the last few months and it's perfectly smooth, even using HD textures. (using Dolphin Ishiruka) Maybe you mean the shader complilation stutters? Those are solved by Ishiruka.

So on that same note I have noticed no problems in Vulkan Beetle either with this... I'm usually really sensitive to that stuff too. Games like Skyrim had horrific framepacing problems on AMD years ago that really bothered me.

 

[jjjfloyd]

Did you use Vulkan renderer in Dolphin? Because that's what I'm talking about. I use Ishiiruka too.

No, I use DX11. There is no need to use Vulkan because it runs perfectly already.