Retroarch scaling for 3D games

[+SpiceWare]

Was trying out RetroArch on my Mac and while it was a bit confusing to get going, it has an interesting feature that improves the appearance of 3D games.

 

Internal GPU Resolution 1x:

 

 

Internal GPU Resolution 2x:

 

 

 

Internal GPU Resolution 4x:

 

 

It looks awesome, and even has options for 8x and 16x, but once I get to 4x it's slow and stuttering because it's falling back to software rendering on my Mac.

 

 

Anybody have any experience with this?  I'd like to get figured out before I next replay the Spyro the Dragon trilogy.

 

 

[+SpiceWare]

There's 2 builds of RetroArch for the Mac, one that supports OpenGL and another that supports Metal. I'd initially installed the Metal version on my Mac Pro.

 

There's 2 versions of the Playstation Emulator: Beetle PSX, and Beetle PSX HW. The first is software rendering only. The HW version supports rendering via software, OpenGL, and Vulkan, but not Metal.

So I installed the OpenGL version of RetroArch. It just quits without a crash screen as soon as I try to launch a game. I turned on the logging feature, but nothing ends up in the log to provide a clue as to what's wrong.

 

I also tried both versions on my Mac mini - neither runs on it.

 

I think I'll put this on the back burner for now, and periodically check in to see if they get it working.

[+SpiceWare]

Found crash reports in Utilities -> Console. It shows the OpenGL version is crashing when it calls GlRenderer_upload_textures().

 

[RevEng]

Yep, most of the 3D emulators do that, and in some cases you can get upscaled (unofficial) texture packs too. On my somewhat-pokey laptop, I recently re-completed Mario Sunshine at 2x native resolution, with a widescreen enabled.

 

Some might prefer original hardware for later systems, but IMO emulation with upscaling is undeniably the best way to play N64, PSX and PSP games.

 

Sorry, I don't have any idea specifically about your OpenGL issue... are your video drivers the latest available version? Usually that resolves a great many issues.

[+SpiceWare]

31 minutes ago, RevEng said:

Sorry, I don't have any idea specifically about your OpenGL issue... are your video drivers the latest available version? Usually that resolves a great many issues.

 

I'm as up to date as I can be, on my Mac Pro 2013 I'm stuck on macOS High Sierra (10.13.6) due to having a 3rd party SSD.  Latest macOS is Catalina (10.15).

 

Just installed the OpenGL Extensions Viewer and see I my OpenGL driver supports up to 4.1, with a couple 4.2 features.

 

 

 

 

[+SpiceWare]

Just installed the OpenGL program on my Mac mini (2018).  It's on macOS Mojave (10.14.6) because Catalina dropped support for 32-bit programs and I have ~1700 recordings I still need to clear out of EyeTV, my old 32-bit DVR software. I'm making progress on that, there were 2455 recordings back in October.

 

OpenGL support on the mini is the same as my Mac Pro. I'm shocked at how much faster the mini is than my Mac Pro, didn't realize integrated graphics had improved so much. Will have to try the other tests later, I only ran the Cube one.

 

 

 

[RevEng]

It may amount to nothing, but you might try Beetle PSC HW again with Metal RetroArch, and try different hardware core options. 

 

Otherwise yeah, try again when the software changes, or try a stand-alone emulator like epsxe and see if it fares better.

[+SpiceWare]

Tried epsxe. The GUI version doesn't do anything when I launched it. The CL version does this when I try to run it:

Darrells-Mac-Pro:epsxeosx-2.0.5.x64 darrellspice$ ./epsxe 
Killed: 9

weird. Suspect the GUI version is silently doing the same thing.

 

Noticed RetroArch has a daily build so I installed it and OpenGL no longer crashes the program. However, while it shows the bitmap screens just fine:

 

 

I get this once the game switches over to using 3D graphics.

 

 

The daily build also runs on the Mac mini without crashing. It has the same results of correctly showing bitmaps, but not 3D graphics.

 

At this point I plan to just periodically check RetroArch.

[RevEng]

Yeah, sounds like a plan. Not to draw you back in, but there does appear to be a fix for the epsxe killed 9 issue.