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Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation

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Re: Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation

#51

Post by jonny_eh »

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #17
chaboud wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among the intended audience, it likely is. I think this article is here to equally amuse and traumatize folks familiar with the system. The Emotion Engine (CPU) to GS (GPU) link was what made the PS2 so impressive for the time, but it also made it somewhat hard to code for and immensely hard to emulate. If I recall correctly, the N64 has something like 4x the memory bandwidth (shared) of the PS1, and the PS2 had roug…

PS2 compatibility on PS3 went through 3 phases. Launch models had EE+GS+RDRAM (full PS2 hardware), just after had only GS, and finally emulation was done entirely in software. Using a CFW can utilize the latest method to play most (ISO backed-up) PS2 games.

> Using a CFW can utilize the latest method to play most (ISO backed-up) PS2 games

Can it not use the first method if the hardware is available?

Re: Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation

#52

Post by Cieric »

badsectoracula wrote: post #25

> Pray you have programmable blending I prayed for programmable blending via "blending shaders" (and FWIW programmable texture decoding via "texture shaders" - useful for custom texture format/compression, texture synthesis, etc) since i first learned about pixel shaders waay back in early 2000s. Somehow GPUs got raytracing before programmable blending when the former felt like some summer night dream and the latter…

I mean most of that could be emulated in vulkan or dx12, I'm not sure about other apis. I'm curious what the use case would be though. I'm also fairly certain it can be done to a degree, but without a convincing use case it's hard to justify the implementation work.

Re: Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation

#53

Post by forgotpwd16 »

jonny_eh wrote: post #51
forgotpwd16 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PS2 compatibility on PS3 went through 3 phases. Launch models had EE+GS+RDRAM (full PS2 hardware), just after had only GS, and finally emulation was done entirely in software. Using a CFW can utilize the latest method to play most (ISO backed-up) PS2 games.

> Using a CFW can utilize the latest method to play most (ISO backed-up) PS2 games Can it not use the first method if the hardware is available?

Sure and actually if available that is the default when mounting ISO. Just saying essentially every PS3 can emulate PS2 games. Not only those with (full or partial) PS2 hardware. Worth mentioning PSN classics (or converted games) utilize software emulation in every PS3.

Re: Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation

#54

Post by BlackLotus89 »

rzzzt wrote: post #28
BlackLotus89 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about the "Sony GPU" (1994) used in the PlayStation? Edit: source https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/chasing-pixe...

The article said it resolved to "Geometry Processing Unit" at that time.

And RAID once stood for array of inexpensive discs and is now independent discs. But you are right different meaning.

Found these here https://books.google.de/books?id=Jzo-qeUtauoC&pg=PT7&dq=%22g... Computerworld magazine 1976 VGI called a graphics processing unit (GPU)

> 3400 is a direct-writing system capable of displaying 3-D graphics and alphanumerics with speeds up to 20.000....

It's not what I would call a GPU, but I think it's hard to draw lines when it comes to naming things and defining things.

If anyone else wants to try to find the real GPU

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22gpu%22+graphics+processin...

Re: Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation

#55

Post by rzzzt »

BlackLotus89 wrote: post #54
rzzzt wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article said it resolved to "Geometry Processing Unit" at that time.

And RAID once stood for array of inexpensive discs and is now independent discs. But you are right different meaning. Found these here https://books.google.de/books?id=Jzo-qeUtauoC&pg=PT7&dq=%22g... Computerworld magazine 1976 VGI called a graphics processing unit (GPU) > 3400 is a direct-writing system capable of displaying 3-D graphics and alphanumerics with speeds up to 20.000.... It's not what I would call a GPU,…

I misunderstood that bit from the Jon Peddie article, the PS1's GPU was indeed a Graphics Processing Unit. Found this hardware overview in one of the Wikipedia sources to confirm: https://archive.org/details/nextgen-issue-006/page/n54/mode/...

Re: Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation

#56

Post by to11mtm »

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #53
jonny_eh wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Using a CFW can utilize the latest method to play most (ISO backed-up) PS2 games Can it not use the first method if the hardware is available?

Sure and actually if available that is the default when mounting ISO. Just saying essentially every PS3 can emulate PS2 games. Not only those with (full or partial) PS2 hardware. Worth mentioning PSN classics (or converted games) utilize software emulation in every PS3.

Huh, TIL!

(I never had a PS3, AFAIR my PSP just downclocked it's CPU, I remember battery life playing classics was awesome...)

Re: Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation

#57

Post by Sesse__ »

armada651 wrote: post #50
Sesse__ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically, not at all. Dolphin's ubershader does one thing; simulate fixed-function blending/texturing using modern flexible hardware. (It was already an old technique when Dolphin adopted it, by the way.) This project is a complete renderer, with the rasterizer and all, and as you can see from the text, it includes an ubershader for the blending. The shader doesn't draw triangles, it just gets called for each point…

> Dolphin's ubershader does one thing; simulate fixed-function blending/texturing using modern flexible hardware. Just to clarify, Dolphin's specialized shaders simulate fixed-function blending/texturing too. What's different about ubershaders is that a single shader can handle a wide variety of fixed-function states whereas a specialized shader can only handle a single state. Thus whereas specialized shaders have to…

This is very true. And to make matters even more confusing, certain drivers were at some point capable of constant-folding shaders on-the-fly so that ubershaders are essentially moved back into a bunch of specialized shaders, negating the entire concept. I don't believe this actually affects Dolphin, though (I think the drivers in question have given up this optimization).

Re: Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation

#58

Post by twoodfin »

deaddodo wrote: post #49
twoodfin wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growing up with the tech press in this era, “commodity RDRAM” is a funny phrase to read! As I recall, the partnership between Intel and Rambus was pilloried as an attempt to re-proprieterize the PC RAM interface in a similar vein to IBM’s microchannel bus.

"Commodity" meaning "something that could be bought at the store".

From the Rambus store!

Re: Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation

#59

Post by troad »

tetris11 wrote: post #33
ammar-DLL wrote: post #12

[dead]

For anyone wondering: > A dynamic recompiler is a type of software that translates code from one instruction set architecture (ISA) to another at runtime, rather than ahead of time. This process allows programs written for one platform to be executed on another platform without needing to modify the original code. Dynamic recompilation is often used in emulators, virtual machines, and just-in-time (JIT) compilation s…

My (limited) understanding is that most serious emulation is done via dynarec these days, particularly past the fourth / fifth gen of consoles.

For newer consoles, traditional interpreted emulation isn't going to be fast enough to be playable, so dynarec is the only realistic option.[0] For the older systems, it's more of a nice-to-have performance boost, particularly as a lot of people now like to play those with demanding upscalers and shaders. (Some older games, like Sonic 2, were designed around composite video artefacts and don't look right without CRT shaders.)

[0] Things get fuzzier on near-current gen consoles, which are more like PCs, and may hypothetically be best emulated with some kind of translation layer not unlike Proton.

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