Will Vulkan support help PCSX2?

[Serial Hacker]

A lot of people are saying that Vulkan asynchronous compute will generally give a really nice boosts for emulators in general, as it can compile shaders in real time.

However I know that the GS chip is quite uniquely emulated via both the CPU and the GPU (at hardware mode) and i was wondering whether Vulkan implementation will assist with PS2 emulation. People are calling the addition of Vulkan to Cemu an 'incredible upgrade', and I really would love to hear your opinions about this.

I could be completely misinformed, I hope this doesn't sound condescending in anyway.

[jesalvein]

What's the actual link between pcsx2 and CEMU ?

[Serial Hacker]

What's the actual link between pcsx2 and CEMU ?

Nothing, I’m just mentioning that Vulkan is getting picked up by other emulators and I’m asking whether this could be relevant to PCSX2.

[jesalvein]

no.
it made a difference for CEMU, because WIIU architecture isn't very far from the one you have in your PC.
Vulkan helped transfering data from hardware to hardware without the need of another pile of software to translate. How can this be ? well, a GC/WII/WIU GPU is basically a PC GPU.So, no need to make a big software translation.

In case of PS2, PS2's hardware looks like... about nothing you can find.
A PS2 is a PS2 with its unique weird architecture, and you need a big pile of software to translate every single instruction so that your PC's CPU/GPU understands them.
This is why Vulkan wouldn't really improve things for pcsx2, and why pcsx2 is quite demanding in terms of raw power.

[pandubz]

PCSX2's only hope of faster performance on Vulkan was the proposed "Shader Interlock" feature, which would have helped speed up blending. And it sounds like the Vulkan maintainers/GPU driver developers do not want to implement this because it has little to no practical use for retail games. PCSX2 doesn't really have dynamic shader compilation like other emulators. Any shaders that are used are precompiled and baked into the program ready to go. Furthermore, we don't even do 3D processing on the GPU, because the PS2 didn't either and we cannot recompile the PS2's vector units on a GPU. All this essentially puts Vulkan on par with OpenGL for feature availability, and (we think) on par with Direct3D11 for development complexity.

TLDR: We would not see any improvement just from having it, and we'd have to "rediscover" all the pitfalls that we already solved on Direct3D11 and OpenGL, so no one is jumping ahead to work on this right now.

[FearManZ]

A lot of people are saying that Vulkan asynchronous compute will generally give a really nice boosts for emulators in general, as it can compile shaders in real time.

However I know that the GS chip is quite uniquely emulated via both the CPU and the GPU (at hardware mode) and i was wondering whether Vulkan implementation will assist with PS2 emulation. People are calling the addition of Vulkan to Cemu an 'incredible upgrade', and I really would love to hear your opinions about this.

I could be completely misinformed, I hope this doesn't sound condescending in anyway.

i'm glad & really love hear this early year pcsx2 adds Vulkan API support, offering an alternative to DirectX or OpenGL rendering that could bring better performance in many games.

“A lot of people were asking for a Vulkan renderer and courtesy of Stenzek it is finally here,” the PCSX2 devs say in a tweet. “It performs better than OpenGL in a lot of cases on similar blending levels so it should make a couple of harder to run games much easier to play.”

Stenzek is best known as the developer behind PlayStation 1 emulator DuckStation, and says the new Vulkan option should be more efficient, future-proof, and faster (“Vulkan can handle high blending loads where even Nvidia’s GL driver struggles,” Stenzek says) than the existing DirectX or OpenGL rendering.

[FearManZ]

no.
it made a difference for CEMU, because WIIU architecture isn't very far from the one you have in your PC.
Vulkan helped transfering data from hardware to hardware without the need of another pile of software to translate. How can this be ? well, a GC/WII/WIU GPU is basically a PC GPU.So, no need to make a big software translation.

In case of PS2, PS2's hardware looks like... about nothing you can find.
A PS2 is a PS2 with its unique weird architecture, and you need a big pile of software to translate every single instruction so that your PC's CPU/GPU understands them.
This is why Vulkan wouldn't really improve things for pcsx2, and why pcsx2 is quite demanding in terms of raw power.

at last  PCSX2 has implemented support for the Vulkan API, offering an alternative to DirectX or OpenGL rendering that could bring better performance in many games, should be more efficient, future-proof, and faster than the existing DirectX or OpenGL rendering.

[refraction]

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