PCSX2 2.8.0 is now out!

Nearly six months after the release of PCSX2 2.6.0 (and two years after the big milestone release of 2.0.0) - we are excited to unveil PCSX2 2.8.0 and showcase what we have been working on since then! To start with a teaser - we have some serious performance gains to talk about with this release; as seen here with Need for Speed: Carbon! Now let's jump into this release's major talking points! tipFor a full list of changes, you can check out our milestone page on GitHub here. The System Requirements Update We have updated our system requirements to reflect several improvements to the core and graphics pipelines that require more powerful hardware than our previous requirements recommended. CautionSee below for our new requirements:Suggested Minimum Suggested Moderate Suggested Heavy CPUIntel Core i5-4570KAMD Ryzen 5 1500XIntel Core i7-8700KAMD Ryzen 5 3600Intel Core i5-12400AMD Ryzen 5 5600GPUNvidia GeForce GTX 750 TiAMD Radeon RX 460Intel Arc A380Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650AMD Radeon RX 5600 XTIntel Arc A580Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 8GBAMD Radeon RX 6600 XTIntel Arc B580 Installer Visual Overhaul The installer has received quite a facelift. It now looks more sleek and comes with dark mode support. It also has received some Quality of Life Improvements such as: In Portable mode, the install location will now default to the root of the drive that the installer is being run from. In Portable mode, it will no longer create an uninstaller entry in the start menu. BeforeAfter New Features Deps: Bundle FFmpeg on Windows FFmpeg is now bundled together with the Windows build of PCSX2. It's no longer necessary for you to download FFmpeg separately before you use the built-in Video Capture! We've also hand-picked the most popular codecs. Previously, we included everything that FFmpeg offered, but this was too much wasted space on codecs that were rarely, if ever, used. The reduced set of codecs should still provide you with all the modern, efficient options you need without taking up much extra space. Video Encoders: Hardware Encoders: AMD AMF/VCE Intel QSV Nvidia NVENC Media Foundations Vulkan Video Software Encoders: libx264 (H264) libx265 (H265) libsvtav1 (AV1) ffv1 (FFmpeg's own codec) qtrle (Apple QT RLE) Audio Encoders: AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) Opus FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) pcm_s16le & pcm_s16be (WAV) USB: Implement EyeToy camera support on macOS SternXD worked on adding EyeToy camera support for macOS. With this, all 3 OSes now have full EyeToy camera support! tipThe EyeToy was a USB camera accessory for the PS2. Supported games used early forms of computer vision or solely used it for taking photos. USB: Train Mascon, Master Controller and Olympus Storage Devices support Florin9doi has worked on adding additional Train Mascon and Master Controller support to the existing Train controller feature. Alongside that, they have also added support for Olympus Camera and Olympus Turbo MO miniEX IV (MO644U2S, MO133U2S) Storage Devices. Qt/FullscreenUI/ImGui: On-Screen Display Customizations This grants the ability to customize the look of the On-Screen Display, such as changing its fonts, location, scale, margin and more. We also gave the On-Screen Display its own dedicated settings within PCSX2. The frame time graph now has more detailed measurements as well! tipUse the monospace variant of your desired font family for the best readability. The Achievements section has received some enhancements! The collapsing headers have been replaced with a sidebar in the achievements menu for games with multiple subsets. Added subset mastery notifications. When a subset is open, the header shows that subset’s title, stats, and progress bar. Missable, Win Condition, and Progression indicators are now shown as small badges next to the achievement title. FullscreenUI: Implement cover download support Just like its Qt counterpart, the Big Picture Mode interface now also gets its own cover downloader functionality! Now you no longer need to go to the Qt interface just to use the cover downloader. Convenience 💯 Qt: Add Icon Selection and Preview to the Shortcut Creator The game shortcut creator now allows you to attach a custom icon to a shortcut as well when you're creating one. No more having to manually add them afterwards! infoWindows only allows icon files (*.ico) for shortcut icons. Qt: Revamp the status bar The status bar has received quite a number of quality of life improvements. You can now control the volume of the virtual console directly from the main interface without going to the audio settings manually. You can now toggle the speed limit directly without using the hotkeys. Additionally, it shows you the host GPU usage, the current renderer, and the currently active internal resolution multiplier. Qt: Add a bunch of Open XXX Folder actions to Game List entries A few new options have been added to the Game List's context menu. These allow you to open the folders of various PCSX2-related game data or resources. You can access this by right-clicking a game entry in the Game List. Qt: Add -datapath launch argument You can now override the default data folder location that PCSX2 uses with your own custom path, instead of being stuck with the default locations. Qt/FSUI: Miscellaneous UI Changes #14228 FullscreenUI: Add analog control to Big Picture Mode #13589 FullscreenUI: Load all language fonts at all times #13933 Qt: Prevent empty Gamelist header + reset option #13933 Qt: show full game titles in grid view #14007 Qt: Toggle mouse lock hotkey #14117 Hotkey: Add Reload Patch Hotkey #14112 GS: Add hotkey for cycling Blending Accuracy #14197 VMManager: Make Prefer English also applies to other things #14191 Qt: Add Option for storing video captures per-games #14448 GS: Add shader compile indicator #14618 Qt: Add sorting to memory card list #14579 Qt/GameListBackground: Auto adjust gamelist text color #14666 Qt: Add Create PCSX2 launcher option to setup wizard #14721 FSUI: Add gamelist hotkey to scan for new games #14284 Qt: Add RetroAchievements to Setup Wizard Performance and Graphics Improvements GS/HW: Depth feedback loops and accurate AFAIL. The PS2's GS is known for being difficult to emulate due to how different it is from the PC hardware we use today. PCSX2 has long had options to choose between accuracy and speed for things like blending. The fast options pick a close but not identical setting for the PC hardware to approximate each setting of the GS. The accurate options move the operation from dedicated hardware to shaders, requiring large numbers of slow barriers to ensure the correct result. Until now, these options have all been only for the main color texture, but the GS also has mismatches with PC hardware in its handling of the depth texture. In particular, the alpha test, which allows discarding pixels when the texture alpha value is below a set cutoff, gives games the choice of whether to discard color, depth, or both. On the other hand, the only option for PC GPUs is to discard both1. For games that choose the option to discard only color, PCSX2 can use the shader blend system to load the existing color from the render target and re-output that, but for depth, PCSX2 didn't support a fully accurate system. Instead, PCSX2 rendered every draw call twice. First, it would draw color only, without discarding based on the alpha test, then a second pass would draw depth only, discarding where needed. This means that if two overlapping triangles occurred in the same draw, it was possible for the wrong result to happen, since the pass that was drawing color didn't update depth and therefore wouldn't reject a further triangle drawn after a closer triangle. To fix this, TJ added a system similar to the color handling for depth, where we disable the dedicated hardware and instead do all processing in the shader. This means disabling the hardware depth test and emulating that as well, so that it doesn't interfere with our attempts to cancel depth update by re-emitting the existing depth value. Unfortunately, due to this being a niche usage of an already niche feature, many of the APIs that did support this kind of shader feedback loop for color failed when we attempted to do the same with depth textures, handing our shaders outdated pixel values. In the end, only Vulkan, which has an extension made explicitly for this purpose, consistently worked, while the D3D12 and OpenGL renderers default to copying the depth texture to a temporary color texture for the handling, then copying the result back to the original depth texture when done.2 3 4 Minna No Tennis: BeforeAfter Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal: BeforeAfter BeforeAfter GS/HW: Support for HW AA1 lines/triangles AA1 is the PS2's name for antialiasing. Unlike MSAA, which rasterizes triangles at a higher resolution and then downsamples, the PS2's AA1 works by adding a semi-transparent border around each triangle as it's drawn. In order for the semi-transparent border to not block the triangles below, it doesn't write depth, even though the fully-opaque parts of the triangle do. Even so, that only prevents things from looking broken under AA1. For fully working antialiasing, PS2 games have to sort their triangles and draw back to front, like in the old depth-buffer-less days of the PS1. Because PC GPUs don't support writing depth for only some triangles in a draw, this was a software-renderer-only feature in PCSX2 for a long time, but TJ used PCSX2's newly-added software depth support to add support for these triangle borders. Due to the high cost of the software depth emulation, this is currently disabled by default, but can be enabled in the graphics settings which will allow it to activate on supported games. Comparison: God Of War: BeforeAfter BeforeAfter Final Fantasy X: BeforeAfter The Incredibles: BeforeAfter Sly 2: BeforeAfter Jonny Moseley Mad Trix: BeforeAfter GS/HW: Support for Rasterizer Order View (ROV) ROV (Rasterizer Ordered Views) provides a way to