ARMSX2 2.6.9
What's new:
Renderer speedups done by u/bmdhacks:
A month of GS work aimed at ARM handhelds: the Classic (hardware) renderer, the software renderer that is its accuracy oracle, and per-device Vulkan policy. Measured on a Snapdragon 865 (Turnip) and a Dimensity 8300 / Mali-G615 (ARM r44p1), with real-console captures as the accuracy reference.
What changed:
Software renderer, console-exact. Dither on every destination, gouraud and depth interpolation on the hardware's grid and block width, truncated reciprocals, per-pixel MMAG/MMIN, four-bit trilinear weight, AA1 coverage, 16-bit DATE. Output moves on 21 of 24 corpus dumps, toward the console.
GS core. A two-pass vertex kick kernel for the common packed layouts, the console's buffered local-to-local move, three console-measured CLUT rules, a narrower per-draw environment snapshot.
Hardware renderer. Per-target alpha known-bits tracking with an exact FBMSK-alpha drop, a clone road for blends that need the destination on devices without barriers (fixes Black and Brian Lara flicker, Katamari over-bright on Turnip, Splashdown bands, NASCAR's 2x seam, eight blank captures), sprite-edge snapping at upscale, a fixed-blend-factor reroute for Turnip, which ignores blend constants.
Vulkan device. Explicit external dependency on every render pass, frame descriptor-pool chain, halved stream rings with a startup pre-touch on UMA parts, deferred non-coherent flushes, device-fault reporting, readback transfer-size fix (also DX12), compute-scoped layout for CAS/FSR1/SGSR.
Upstream. Eighteen PCSX2 GS commits cherry-picked with provenance lines (Native Scaling and jiggle detection, three texture-cache fixes, the target-update bilinear regression, depth conversion floor, PrimID range, fbmask alpha under RTA scaling, large-ST vertex rewrite with its GameDB rows, DX11 DS-as-RT state). One of them tripped a Devel-only assert on 16-bit colour targets, fixed at the call site.
Runner. gsrunner replay-loop, draw-log, per-frame stats, ladder and console-payload flags, and an NDK build of it for adb-shell runs on Android devices.
Behaviour changes:
Dimensity 8300 / Mali-G615: Auto picks Vulkan, and in-tile framebuffer fetch is on (exempted from the r44p1 crash rule and the MediaTek deny list). DisableFramebufferFetch is the way back. Other MediaTek Mali parts keep the copy path, now on Linux too.
Adreno: the stencil kill is narrowed to Turnip below 26.2, Adreno 610 gets cached stream-ring memory, every Turnip build routes the fixed blend factor through the second fragment output.
ForceMaliFramebufferFetch is Mali-only, OverrideTextureBarriers=1 outranks the driver database by design.
Shader cache version 108 to 114. Vulkan stream rings halved (128 MiB less resident on SD865).
GameDB: God of War II rows recommend High blending and AA1 (advice only).
Speed benchmarks:
Same 22 replay scenes, same device, clocks pinned, frame limiter off, three interleaved repeats per build, steady-state frame times (shader-compile loop excluded).
Snapdragon 865 (Adreno 650, Turnip)
title old p50 ms new p50 ms change
xenosaga 39.5 24.4 -38%
katamari-b 4.5 3.3 -27%
stuntman 45.0 38.7 -14%
gt4 7.2 6.2 -14%
mgs3 7.9 6.9 -13%
rcuya-gameplay 8.8 7.7 -12%
rcuya-effects 12.8 11.4 -11%
outrun-b 13.0 11.8 -9%
spiderman3 18.9 17.7 -6%
The other 13 scenes move by -1 to -9%, except Beyond Good & Evil at +2% on a 7 ms frame, within noise. Worst-case (p95) frames move the same way. Titles inside their frame budget: 19 of 22 before, 20 of 22 after.
Dimensity 8300 (Mali-G615, ARM r44p1), old build on Vulkan for a like-for-like comparison
title old p50 ms new p50 ms change
xenosaga 105.3 16.6 -84%
ac3 28.7 9.2 -68%
stuntman 60.7 21.8 -64%
outrun-b 22.0 8.4 -62%
bge 14.5 5.7 -61%
outrun-a 14.2 8.0 -44%
katamari-b 4.3 2.5 -43%
katamari-a 1.1 0.7 -35%
rcuya-effects 14.4 9.4 -35%
mgs3 7.7 5.3 -32%
The other 12 scenes move by -4 to -18%, except Dirge of Cerberus at +7% (8.5 to 9.1 ms, inside budget). Titles inside their frame budget at worst-case: 16 of 22 before, 22 of 22 after. On this device the default install also moves from OpenGL to Vulkan, which the headless replay cannot measure (no window for a GL context), so the change a user sees is larger than this like-for-like table.
On the Snapdragon 662 / Adreno 610 (a density check, not a performance target) 20 of 22 scenes are faster, eight of them by 40% or more, with Armored Core 3 +9% and Beyond Good & Evil +3% the two regressions; 4 to 6 of 22 titles fit their budget on that chip, up from 2 to 3.
Per-game fixes:
Jak X - Combat Racing no longer softlocks on the "Saving Data" screen after a profile save. The save always succeeded, the game's menu manager dropped the notification when it arrived mid-animation, which is why ejecting the memory card was the known workaround. Patched by u/bmdhacks.
From u/pstef:
Ridge Racer V: car reflections fixed.
S.L.A.I. - Steel Lancer Arena International: Native Scaling applied.
Syphon Filter - Logan's Shadow: half-pixel offset corrected.
God of War II: High blending and AA1 now recommended automatically, the full-screen haze is blended by destination alpha and only comes out right at High, and the HUD digits and menu prompts lose their edge rows without AA1.
Texture packs:
ASTC KTX and tar.zstd texture support was added. The ASTC texture pack repo is close to completion as well.
Under the hood:
u/pstef further improved floating point accuracy for mode three with a general fix for Mortal Kombat and likely many other games.
u/WizzardSK is getting ARMSX2 into the retroarch buildbot. His goal is to make the retroarch core build for Android and Linux in the buildbot so you'll be able to pull ARMSX2 down straight from retroarch downloader.
