The latest PC gaming hardware news, plus expert, trustworthy and unbiased buying guides.USA Location information - USA. Libretro – A crossplatform application API, powering the crossplatform gaming platform Retro. Arch. I needed a break from para. LLEl RDP, and I wanted to give PSX a shot to have an excuse to write a higher level Vulkan renderer backend. The renderer backends in Beetle PSX are quite well abstracted away, so plugging in my own renderer was a trivial task. The original Play. Station is certainly a massively simpler architecture than N6. OpenLara is now available as a libretro core! This is a new work-in-progress Tomb Raider game engine by developer XProger and is already progressing rapidly. USA.com provides easy to find states, metro areas, counties, cities, zip codes, and area codes information, including population, races, income, housing, school. Two Hours Before Sunset. Djursland, Denmark. By Robbert Vervuurt. GIF made from video of the THAAD missile defense system test launched yesterday from Alaska to hit a target sent from north of Hawaii (US Missile Defense Agency) The. After one evening of studying the Rustation renderer by simias and PSX GPU docs, I had a decent idea of how it worked. Many hardware features of the N6. Perspective correctness (no W from GTE)Texture filtering. Sub- pixel precision on vertices (wobbly polygons, wee)Mipmapping. No programmable texture cache. Depth buffering. Complex combiners. My goal was to create a very accurate HW renderer which supports internal upscaling. Making anything at native res for PSX is a waste of time as software renderers are basically perfected at this point in Mednafen and more than fast enough due to the simplicity. Dishonored 2 review - A riveting, ravishing adventure that represents the best gaming has to offer. IPhone: Apple’s default camera app is a multifaceted photo capture tool, and simple enough to use. From panoramas to videos to HDR pictures, you can capture a. The very good adventure game Thimbleweed Park is coming to Nintendo Switch, AKA the perfect place for it. Kids and electronics usually don’t mix. I have more than one broken headphone jack and a missing iPod thanks to my siblings. With my family visiting this week, my. Another goal was to improve my experience with 2. D heavy games like the Square RPGs which heavily mix 2. D elements with 3. D. I always had issues with upscaling plugins back in the day as I always had to accept blocky and ugly 2. D in order to get crisp 3. D. Simply sampling all textures with bilinear is one approach, but it falls completely flat on PSX. Content was not designed with this in mind at all, and you’ll quickly find that tons of artifacts are created when the bilinear filtering tries to filter outside its designated blocks in VRAM. The final goal is to do all of this without ugly hacks, game specific workarounds or otherwise shitty code. It was excusable in a time where graphics APIs could not cleanly express what emulation authors wanted to express, but now we can. Development of this renderer was a fairly smooth ride, mostly done in spare time over ~2 months. Credits. This renderer would not exist without the excellent Mednafen emulator and Rustation GL renderer. Tested hardware/driversn. Vidia Linux/Windows 3. AMDGPU- PRO 1. 6. Linux (works fully)Mesa Intel (Ivy Bridge half- way working, Broadwell+, fully working, you’ll want to build from Git to get some important bug fixes which were uncovered by this renderer : D)Mesa Radeon RADV (fully working, you’ll want to build from Git to get support for input attachments)– But, but, I don’t have a Vulkan- capable GPUWell, read on anyways, some of this work will benefit the GL renderer as well.– But, but, you’re stupid, you should do this in GL 1. No . Interestingly enough, this VRAM is actually organized as a 2. D grid, and not a flat array with width/height/stride. This certainly simplifies things a lot as we can now represent the VRAM as a texture instead of shuffling data in and out of SSBOs. Unlike N6. 4, the CPU doesn’t have direct access to this VRAM (phew), so access is mediated by various commands. Textures. The PSX can sample textures at 4- bit palettes, 8- bit palettes or straight ABGR1. Texture coordinates are confined to a texture window, which is basically an elaborate way to implement texture repeats. Textures are sampled directly from VRAM, but there is a small texture cache. For purposes of emulation, this cache is ignored (except for one particular case which we’ll get to . There is no real alpha channel to speak of, we only have one bit, so what PSX does is set a constant transparency formula, (A + B, 0. A + 0. 5. B, B – A, or 0. A + B). If the high- bit of a texture color is set, transparency is enabled, if not, the fragment is considered opaque. Semi- transparent color- only primitives are simply always transparent. Mask- bit. Possibly the most difficult feature of the PSX GPU is the mask- bit. The alpha bit in VRAM is considered a “read- only” bit if mask bit testing is enabled and the read- only bit is set. This affects rendering primitives as well as copies from CPU and VRAM- to- VRAM blits. Especially mask- bit emulation + semi- transparency creates a really difficult blending scenario which I haven’t found a way to do correctly with fixed function (but that won’t stop us in Vulkan). Correctly emulating mask- bit lets us render Silent Hill correctly. The trees have transparent quads around them without it. Intersecting VRAM blits. It is possible, and apparently, well defined on PSX to blit from one part of VRAM to another part where the rects intersect. Reading the Mednafen/Beetle software implementation, we need to kind of emulate the texture cache. Fortunately, this was very doable with compute shaders, although not very efficient. Implementation details. Feature – Adaptive smoothing. As mentioned, I prefer smooth 2. D with crisp- looking 3. D. I devised a scheme to do this in post. The basic idea is to look at our 4x or 8x scaled image, we then mip- map that down to 1x with a box filter. While mip- mapping, we analyze the variance within the 4. The assumption here is that if we have nearest- neighbor scaled 2. D elements, they typically have a 1: 1 pixel correspondency in native resolution, and hence, the variance within the block will be 0. With 3. D elements, there will be some kind of variance, either by values which were shaded slightly differently, or more dramatically, a geometry edge. We now compute an R8. To avoid sharp transitions in LOD, the bias- mask is then blurred slightly with a 3. Sure, it’s not perfect, but I’m quite happy with the result. Consider this scene from FF IX. While some will prefer this look (it’s toggleable), I’m not a big fan of blocky nearest- neighbor backgrounds together with high- res models. With adaptive smoothing, we can smooth out the background and speech bubble back to native resolution where they belong. You may notice that the shadow under Vivi is sharp, because the shadow which modulates the background is not 1: 1. This is the downside of doing it in post certainly, but it’s hard to notice unless you’re really looking. The bias mask texture looks like this after the blur: Potential further ideas here would be to use the bias- mask as a lerp between x. BR- style upscalers if we wanted to actually make the GPU not fall asleep. There is nothing inherently Vulkan specific about this method, so it will possibly arrive in the GL backend at some point as well. It can probably be used with N6. Obviously, for 2. FMVs), the output is always in native resolution. GPU dump player. Just like the N6. RDP, having an offline dump player for debugging, playback and analysis is invaluable, so the first thing I did was to create a basic dump format which captures PSX GPU commands and plays them back. This is also nice for benchmarking as any half- capable GPU will be bottlenecked on CPU. PGXP support. Supporting PGXP for sub- pixel precision and perspective correctness was trivial as all the work happens outside the renderer abstraction to begin with. I just had to pass down W to the vertex shader. Mask bit emulation. Mask bit emulation without transparency is quite trivial. When rendering, we just use fixed function blending, src = INV. To solve this, I made use of Vulkan’s subpass self- dependency feature which allows us to read the pixel of the framebuffer which enables programmable blending. Now, mask- bit emulation becomes trivial. This feature is a standard way of doing the equivalent of GL. For mask- bit in copies and blits, this is done in compute, so implementing mask bit here is trivial. Copies/Blits. Copies in VRAM are all implemented in compute. The main reason for this is mask bit emulation becomes trivial, plus that we can now overlap GPU execution of rendering and blits if they don’t intersect each other in VRAM. It is also much easier to batch up these blits with compute, whereas doing it in fragment adds some restrictions as we would need to potentially create many tiny render passes to blit small regions one by one, and we need blending to implement masked blits, which places some restrictions on which formats we can use. When blitting blocks which came from rendered output, the implementation blits the high- res data instead. This improves visual quality in many cases. Being careful here made the FF8 battle swirl work for me, finally. I’ve never seen that work properly in HW plugins before . It emulates the texture cache by reading in data from VRAM into registers, barrier(), then writing out. This then loops through the blit region. It’s fairly rare, but this case does trigger in surprising places, so I figured I better do it as accurate as I could. The Framebuffer Atlas – Hazard tracking. The entire VRAM is one shared texture where we do all our rendering, scanout, blits, texture sampling and so on. I needed a system where I could track hazards like sampling from a VRAM region that has been rendered to, and deal with changing resolutions where crazy scenarios like CPU blitting raw pixels over a framebuffer region which was rendered in high resolution. Vulkan allows us to go crazy with simultaneous use of textures (VK. This texture also has log. One R3. 2. I actually wanted R1. Here we store the “raw” bit pattern of VRAM, which makes paletted texture reads way cheaper than having to pack/unpack from UNORM. I split the VRAM into 8. All hazards and dependencies are tracked at this level. If it is, I will inject compute workgroups which “resolve” one domain to the other. If the access is a “write” access, the block will be set to “UNSCALED only” or “SCALED only” so that if anyone tries to access the block in a different domain, they will have to resolve the block first. To resolve SCALED to UNSCALED, a simple box- filter is used. In effect, at 4x scale we get 1. SSAA at 8x scale . The rationale for doing it this way is that resolving up and down in scale is a stable process. Using nearest neighbor for up- resolves also works excellent with adaptive smoothing since we will get a smoothed version of the block which was resolved from UNSCALED and wasn’t overwritten by SCALED later. Another cool thing is that I use R3. Regular ABGR1. 55. US Tests Alaskan Missile Defense System Following North Korea ICBM Launch. The US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) has released video of a test conducted yesterday using a dummy missile that was launched north of Hawaii. The missile was obliterated by another missile shot from Alaska by the THAAD defense system. And it’s a not- so- subtle message to North Korea that the US is ready to shoot down any object that may threaten US airspace. North Korea recently tested an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that many experts believe could reach Alaska, despite the fact that the isolated country has yet to prove that it can miniaturize a nuclear weapon to fit on an ICBM. But that hasn’t stopped the US military from aggressively testing its offensive and defensive capabilities as the situation on the Korean peninsula heats up. The newly released video shows a US Air Force C- 1. Pacific Ocean, somewhere north of Hawaii. The THAAD missile defense system stationed at the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Kodiak, Alaska tracked the launch and sent out its own missile to destroy the dummy target.“This test further demonstrates the capabilities of the THAAD weapon system and its ability to intercept and destroy ballistic missile threats. THAAD continues to protect our citizens, deployed forces and allies from a real and growing threat,” MDA Director Lt. Sam Greaves said in a statement. The THAAD system uses kinetic energy rather than explosives to neutralize an incoming missile. The missiles launched from the THAAD system are designed to simply destroy the target using its own force. But even if the “defensive” missiles are inert, they can still pose a problem if they don’t hit their target. Jeffrey Lewis from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies recently wrote in the Daily Beast about how a misfire by the THAAD missile defense system could accidentally trigger a nuclear war. And it’s pretty terrifying. Moreover, we can’t assume that Russia would realize the launch from Alaska was a missile defense interceptor rather than an ICBM. From Russia, the trajectories might appear quite similar, especially if the radar operator was under a great deal of stress or pressure. In 1. 99. 5, for instance, the Russian military mistook the launch of a sounding rocket from Norway for a launch of a nuclear- armed Trident missile from the sea and alerted Boris Yeltsin. The Norwegian rocket was actually flying away from the Russia, but it took several very tense minutes for the Russian warning system to figure that out. It doesn’t matter how Russia’s early warning system ought to work on paper, the reality of the Russian system in practice has been a lot less impressive. The THAAD system (an acronym for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) is also deployed in South Korea and remains incredibly controversial there. Many South Koreans think it merely heightens tensions in the region and doesn’t make anyone safer. North Korea has naturally been very interested in the THAAD system, even sending a drone at least 1. South Korea to spy on it before it crashed. The drone was discovered to have photos of the THAAD missile system on a store- bought Sony camera. The US military touts yesterday’s test as the 1. Alaska. And if things continue down a path of war, we can probably expect plenty more where that came from. Here’s hoping that Donald Trump and Kim Jong- un don’t bring us to that.
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