New Vulkan-based emulator for N64

[therealnickdanger]

For those that haven't seen it:
http://www.libretro.com/index.php/nintendo-64-vulkan-low-level-emulator-parallel-pre-alpha-release/

I tried it and it's pretty cool. Still broken for a lot of games, but some games that used to have problems are now flawless. Lots of potential here. I wish Dolphin had gone with Vulkan instead of DX12, but oh well.

 

[Sonikku]

Spock would approve. :thumbsup:

 

[dogen1]

I wish Dolphin had gone with Vulkan instead of DX12, but oh well.

They did(there are vulkan and dx12 paths), but this is totally different.

What makes this emulator unique is that it emulates the n64s RDP(it's gpu essentially) entirely on your gpu using compute shaders. This lets them emulate it with the accuracy of a software renderer, but much faster than on a cpu.

It's not doing anything that inherently requires Vulkan though, and it is eventually going to get an openGL version.

 

[psolord]

good info, thanks

I've been out of the loop with emus lately

 

[therealnickdanger]

They did(there are vulkan and dx12 paths), but this is totally different.

Oh sweet! There was a ton of press about its 5.0 release using DX12, but I never saw a similar release about Vulkan. I hope more emulators follow suit, because this is a literal game changer.

While I'm excited that paraLLel is going the "pixel perfect" route, I do hope that they allow for enhancements as well.

 

[Triloby]

I also tried out that N64 Vulkan alpha emulator, and I was immediately impressed at the performance I got on my locked Core i5 and Radeon R9 290. Even tough to emulate games like Rogue Squadron on the N64 were able to run, despite obvious bugs, glitches, and speed issues there were.

It's almost surprising just how little progress has been made in N64 emulation. But I don't blame emulator developers for that. The N64 was such a pain in the ass to program games for, and I reckon it wasn't any easier trying to emulate all of the system's capabilities accurately either.

At least Vulkan and DX12 will help make accurate N64 emulation more possible than ever. Fingers crossed on that.

 

[nismotigerwvu]

It's almost surprising just how little progress has been made in N64 emulation. But I don't blame emulator developers for that. The N64 was such a pain in the ass to program games for, and I reckon it wasn't any easier trying to emulate all of the system's capabilities accurately either.

Exactly! The N64 was at this weird crossroads where it was much closer to modern 3D hardware than the purely integer crunching PS1 and the out there quadratic primitives of the Saturn (also purely integer math as well, but that's the least odd aspect of the system) but at the same time it did some goofy stuff as well (like that 3 point texture filtering and whatnot). You can map most of the N64 functions to a modern GPU and get it to look reasonable, but it's a HUGE undertaking to get it to look exactly like the actual hardware.

 

[dogen1]

Oh sweet! There was a ton of press about its 5.0 release using DX12, but I never saw a similar release about Vulkan. I hope more emulators follow suit, because this is a literal game changer.

While I'm excited that paraLLel is going the "pixel perfect" route, I do hope that they allow for enhancements as well.

I don't think that's part of the plan. The point is that it's replicating what the original hardware did. It's technically a port of a low level rdp plugin
called angrylion, which, iirc, is per pixel accurate. I don't even know if it would be possible to make it run at higher resolutions, and if you could you'd probably end up reintroducing issues it was intended to avoid in the first place.

At least Vulkan and DX12 will help make accurate N64 emulation more possible than ever. Fingers crossed on that.

There's going to be an openGL port, like I said. It's not really vulkan enabling this or anything. Vulkan might speed it up a bit, but it doesn't depend on anything new that it provides. Just compute shaders. They could probably make a dx11 version too if they wanted.

 

[Triloby]

Exactly! The N64 was at this weird crossroads where it was much closer to modern 3D hardware than the purely integer crunching PS1 and the out there quadratic primitives of the Saturn (also purely integer math as well, but that's the least odd aspect of the system) but at the same time it did some goofy stuff as well (like that 3 point texture filtering and whatnot). You can map most of the N64 functions to a modern GPU and get it to look reasonable, but it's a HUGE undertaking to get it to look exactly like the actual hardware.

On the plus side, at least N64 emulation isn't entirely dead in the water.

The same can't be said for Sega Saturn emulation. With the exception of the closed-source SSF, I don't see Saturn emulation improving in the future. The only open-source Saturn emulator out there is Yabause, and that one doesn't even come close to beating SSF in terms of features and compatibility. Kind of a damn shame considering how little love the Saturn gets compared to both the PSX and N64.

 

[dogen1]

On the plus side, at least N64 emulation isn't entirely dead in the water.

The same can't be said for Sega Saturn emulation. With the exception of the closed-source SSF, I don't see Saturn emulation improving in the future. The only open-source Saturn emulator out there is Yabause, and that one doesn't even come close to beating SSF in terms of features and compatibility. Kind of a damn shame considering how little love the Saturn gets compared to both the PSX and N64.

There's yabause which is still being worked on. I've also heard rumors that the mednafen developers are working on one as well. A few other people were said to have been working on saturn emulators(the authors of kega fusion and regen), but I don't think anyone's heard any news from them in a while.

 

[Triloby]

There's yabause which is still being worked on. I've also heard rumors that the mednafen developers are working on one as well. A few other people were said to have been working on saturn emulators(the authors of kega fusion and regen), but I don't think anyone's heard any news from them in a while.

I already know about Yabause, but I don't know how much it has improved in the past few years. Haven't touched Saturn emulation for several years, anyway. I'll be surprised if the Mednafen developers are actually working on a Saturn emulator. That would be welcome news.

 

[dark zero]

On the plus side, at least N64 emulation isn't entirely dead in the water.

The same can't be said for Sega Saturn emulation. With the exception of the closed-source SSF, I don't see Saturn emulation improving in the future. The only open-source Saturn emulator out there is Yabause, and that one doesn't even come close to beating SSF in terms of features and compatibility. Kind of a damn shame considering how little love the Saturn gets compared to both the PSX and N64.

Someone managed to hack the Sega Saturn and seems that published the results on the net.

So seems that Saturn emulation might be revived.

 

[nismotigerwvu]

Someone managed to hack the Sega Saturn and seems that published the results on the net.

So seems that Saturn emulation might be revived.

That was just the CD-ROM subsystem. It's still useful information for the community but in terms of emulators it really might only lead to more accurate load times and whatnot. The SH-1 wasn't really accessible to game developers as far as I know, that and they had access to 2 SH-2's, a 68000 derivative and some spiffy DSP's so I doubt anyone would have really had much use for it anyways. When it comes to actual hardware, this could lead to a new class of SD-loaders, which is fantastic for preservation purposes as a combination of disc rot and failing lasers will eventually kill off the pressed discs or any means of reading surviving discs.

 

[therealnickdanger]

We can also probably blame the slow N64 emu progress on the early successes of Project64. It did too good of a job early on (during the N64's lifetime) and had such a variety of plugins to handle most hardware configurations. I think the need waned.

While it makes me feel old, the fact that the Playstation, N64, and Saturn are now considered "old school" by teens and 20-somethings (many of whom have never even seen a Commodore 64, Atari, or NES in real life) is probably going to result in resurgence of emulation popularity. The advent of powerful new tools (DX12/Vulkan) that greatly improve parallel compute and the hardware to support it obviously has a positive impact on the emu scene as well.

 

[dogen1]

The advent of powerful new tools (DX12/Vulkan) that greatly improve parallel compute and the hardware to support it obviously has a positive impact on the emu scene as well.

Except dx12 did little to change or improve compute. It's compute shader API is essentially the same as dx11. Asynchronous compute doesn't make compute shaders more parallel, it just lets you overlap them with graphics work. Not exactly applicable to this program, because the vast majority of work being done by the GPU will be pure compute already.

As I said there's gonna be an opengl version as well, and it's probably gonna perform very similarly.

 

[Red Hawk]

Neato.

Oh sweet! There was a ton of press about its 5.0 release using DX12, but I never saw a similar release about Vulkan. I hope more emulators follow suit, because this is a literal game changer.

While I'm excited that paraLLel is going the "pixel perfect" route, I do hope that they allow for enhancements as well.

Well someone came along and basically handed the Dolphin team a DX12 backend a few months before they released 5.0, so of course they highlighted that with the release. They always still intended to get a Vulkan backend working though and in fact listed it in their predictions for the next full release, they just got to DX12 first. I think they have a working Vulkan backend in the development versions of the emulator by now.

 

[dogen1]

Just wanted to mention that experimental Sega Saturn support was just added to mednafen.

 

[JDG1980]

I'm hoping for Vulkan support on PCSX2. The DX11 renderer has some graphics glitches on Dragon Quest VIII (which is about the only PS2 game I care about). OpenGL with 'ultra' shaders can do it right at 1x scaling (though still glitches when upscaled for some reason), but I was disappointed to find that even the RX 480 can only do about 20-30 FPS with that setting. Vulkan should allow breaking through the bottleneck while maintaining this level of accuracy.

 

[dark zero]

That was just the CD-ROM subsystem. It's still useful information for the community but in terms of emulators it really might only lead to more accurate load times and whatnot. The SH-1 wasn't really accessible to game developers as far as I know, that and they had access to 2 SH-2's, a 68000 derivative and some spiffy DSP's so I doubt anyone would have really had much use for it anyways. When it comes to actual hardware, this could lead to a new class of SD-loaders, which is fantastic for preservation purposes as a combination of disc rot and failing lasers will eventually kill off the pressed discs or any means of reading surviving discs.

Not really... with that "just" discover, that can lead into a weird revival since one subsystem is totally hacked, the rest can go down if people join his efforts.

 

[dogen1]

I'm hoping for Vulkan support on PCSX2. The DX11 renderer has some graphics glitches on Dragon Quest VIII (which is about the only PS2 game I care about). OpenGL with 'ultra' shaders can do it right at 1x scaling (though still glitches when upscaled for some reason), but I was disappointed to find that even the RX 480 can only do about 20-30 FPS with that setting. Vulkan should allow breaking through the bottleneck while maintaining this level of accuracy.

Do you mean blending unit accuracy? Yeah, that's a really demanding option. Does it really require ultra though? Iirc, that mode is really only intended for testing/debugging. It's insanely demanding(in some games) because of the hugely increased amount of draw calls and forced flushing of the texture cache.

About vulkan, it might happen at some point in the future but probably not soon. Only one guy is working on gsdx, and there's already plenty of stuff for him to work on. Plus, nvidia cards already handle the higher blending modes mostly fine, and he isn't too keen on doing what he considers to be AMDs job.