Swordpdf/PS5SX2 vk-285-122

PS5SX2 1.8

on GitHub

PS5SX2 1.8 (build vk-285-122)

Performance

• Spider-Man 2, Need for Speed Underground 2: the GS thread spent 27–40% of its time in one texture-cache lookup that got slower the more textures were cached. That lookup is fast now, so these games should run faster where they slowed down.
• Lots of small GPU readbacks on newer firmware: The Punisher, Max Payne 2 and Guitar Hero World Tour spent up to half of every second waiting on readbacks. 1.7's automatic "Don't wait" switch now catches this case too ("READBACKS: DON'T WAIT (AUTO)" on screen). If you set GPU readbacks yourself, your choice is kept.
• Vulkan driver: the work it does for every draw is much lighter (the parts we changed took about 7% of the GS thread in Ratchet & Clank at 6x). This helps games that draw a lot at high resolution.

Settings

• Game settings now save on every console. If /data/PCSX2/settings was missing, saving a game's settings failed ("could not write the settings file"). PS5SX2 creates the folder by itself now.

Controls

• The Create button (the old Share, left of the touchpad) no longer presses Select. The touchpad click is still Select.

Logs (for testers)

• The profiler now shows which part of PS5SX2 called into the system libraries, and lists more of the busy spots.
• Software renderer: the log now says why it waits for its worker threads. A background memory check that ran every 200 frames is gone.

Not fixed yet

• Scenes where the PS5's GPU is the limit at high resolution: Scarface, The Simpsons Hit & Run (5–6x), Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, God of War II, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (6x). Use a lower resolution there for now.
• Software renderer slowdowns (NFS Most Wanted Black Edition, God of War, Driv3r, Burnout 3, GTA Liberty City Stories): measured, not fixed yet. Use the hardware renderer where you can.
• Tekken Tag Tournament: not changed.
• Tip: Blending "High" costs a lot at 4x and above. In testers' logs at 4x, about 18% of the minutes played with High were slow, against about 2% with Basic.

Big thanks to Mihawk: PS5SX2 runs on a modified version of his Vulkan driver.

In PS5SX2-vk-285-122.zip: the same layout as 1.7. PPSA99203/ goes to /data/homebrew/ (eboot.bin, sce_sys/, sce_module/libc.prx), PCSX2/ goes to /data/. Only eboot.bin (and the source commits named in NOTICE.txt) changed since 1.7; every other file is byte-identical.

Updating from 1.7 or older: the PS5SX2 Installer does it for you. By hand: close PS5SX2 and replace only /data/homebrew/PPSA99203/eboot.bin. Keep your /data/PCSX2 folder: your settings, memory cards and save states are in it.

Checks:

• eboot.bin sha256 5f10285b7058bda352b8ad80260638b4599457a53a3e5b1fdcb81c253f89e686, built from d0db74e (this tag); its boot.log reads build=vk-285-122 and sources: driver 851eb262a2, pcsx2 d0db74ece7.
• Zip sha256 8c1488600832971702b1fe09dc68f64e1a1206be7ff307e0a4dea96ed49820a1.
• PS5SX2Installer.elf sha256 6b1be3ea24ec8144b27b2a1f3e279cd17574f3093e9431abf8579dcc6c0bfae9 (the same as 1.7's).