There's A Vulkan Renderer In The Works For A PlayStation Emulator

[phoronix]

Phoronix: There's A Vulkan Renderer In The Works For A PlayStation Emulator

Earlier this year the LibRetro crew unveiled their work on a Vulkan renderer for their Nintendo 64 emulator while now they have been working on a Vulkan renderer for a PlayStation One emulator, and it's already working...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LibRetro-PS1-Vulkan-Renderer

[gotwig]

I play with epsxe on android, I wish it would be open source and have a vulkan renderer too :x i wish vulkan on android would turn mainstream

[Chewi]

Awesome! I tried to play Chrono Cross on PCSX-Reloaded a while back but while the emulator works quite well in general, it struggles with this game. It freezes up unless you enable High Compatibility mode but then the audio becomes unbearably choppy, even on a powerful machine. I tried hacking away at it to make it process the audio in a separate thread but while it didn't make it any worse, it didn't make it any better either. Accurately emulating hardware is a really black art. I'll have to see if this project does it any better. Vulkan is a nice bonus!

[curaga]

PS1 can be emulated entirely in software with cpu to spare, not exactly the most pressing of places for Vulkan. The hype for "$THING but in Vulkan!!!11" is really getting tiresome. Just like with patents, $THING but with computers!!111one.

Chrono Cross on PCSX-Reloaded ... struggles with this game

I played through it completely using pcsxr a year ago, without any issues. Looks like I have high compat mode enabled in the audio plugin settings. As is usual with audio things, perhaps you want to remove pulseaudio? I don't have pulse, and this is afterall the most common cause of audio issues on Linux.

[NomadDemon]

I think vulkan for (xxx) is great info for everyone, it mean that we have developers interested in this technology

[Chewi]

I played through it completely using pcsxr a year ago, without any issues. Looks like I have high compat mode enabled in the audio plugin settings. As is usual with audio things, perhaps you want to remove pulseaudio? I don't have pulse, and this is afterall the most common cause of audio issues on Linux.

Trust me, I do use PulseAudio normally but I tried everything including that. Others encountered it too, even on MacOS. It's been over 2 years since I last tried so I could give it another shot.

[mdias]

As is usual with audio things, perhaps you want to remove pulseaudio? I don't have pulse, and this is afterall the most common cause of audio issues on Linux.

I can't help but notice how you're complaining about hype around Vulkan getting tiresome while not being tired of beating on pulseaudio. Maybe you're not aware but PA actually solved more problems than it created. Now, perhaps you're one of the few unlucky ones that keep having problems with it, but that doesn't mean PA is the most common cause of audio issues on Linux. Actually PA's problems usually comes from bad behaviour on part of ALSA drivers (which may or may not manifest when playing audio directly through ALSA, without PA).

PS1 can be emulated entirely in software with cpu to spare, not exactly the most pressing of places for Vulkan.

This is the reason computers keep getting faster and desktop environments don't get faster. Having more resources available doesn't mean you should stop caring about optimal resource usage. Or maybe I'm just getting old and desktop environments should indeed keep being build on top of javascript, and mobile operating systems built on top of Java...

[curaga]

This is the reason computers keep getting faster and desktop environments don't get faster. Having more resources available doesn't mean you should stop caring about optimal resource usage. Or maybe I'm just getting old and desktop environments should indeed keep being build on top of javascript, and mobile operating systems built on top of Java...

This is a strawman. As computers get faster, so does the software PS1 emulator. It does not become magically more inefficient over time. I'm categorically against inefficient programming and using needless layers just like you. Vulkan is a bad case here, because less than a few percent of the installed hw base can use Vulkan - so what if it's more efficient when nobody can use it? -- That's like making a dedicated RISC-V backend for the emulator. It's cool and improves efficiency on that platform, but from an overall viewpoint that work is not as useful as something that would improve efficiency for everyone.

[cj.wijtmans]

This is a strawman. As computers get faster, so does the software PS1 emulator. It does not become magically more inefficient over time. I'm categorically against inefficient programming and using needless layers just like you. Vulkan is a bad case here, because less than a few percent of the installed hw base can use Vulkan - so what if it's more efficient when nobody can use it? -- That's like making a dedicated RISC-V backend for the emulator. It's cool and improves efficiency on that platform, but from an overall viewpoint that work is not as useful as something that would improve efficiency for everyone.

bollox.

[Masush5]

Everyone having issues with ps1 emulation should give mednafen psx a shot. It only supports software rendering but has by far the best compatibility and played every game i tried so far flawlessly. Beetle PSX is basically a fork which ports mednafen psx to libretro and add hardware accelerated rendering via OpenGL and now vulkan, but it's not quite there yet.