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Upcoming Changes: Hardware Accelerated ASTC Texture Decoding
🕑 Added 2021-02-05 19:15:31 +0000 UTCHey Patrons! Continuing our promise to keep you updated on our behind the scenes development process, we have more information to share on an upcoming feature. In this mini-update, we are going to take a look at our upcoming Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) GPU Decoder.
To explain to you why we developed this feature, we need to provide you with a bit of additional information on this texture format.
Many Nintendo Switch games utilize ASTC textures (Super Mario Odyssey, Luigi's Mansion 3, Astral Chain, and others). However, some games, more so than others, use much larger texture sizes. Astral Chain for example, commonly uses 4096x4096 textures. As far as texture sizes come, this is enormous. These textures, like all others, must be decoded in order to be rendered. This is where we have noticeably run into issues, especially in games like Astral Chain and Luigi's Mansion 3 that heavily use large ASTC textures. At the moment neither Nvidia or AMDs discrete desktop GPUs have native support for ASTC texture decoding and while Intel iGPUs (UHD 5XX series and newer) do support it, those integrated GPUs lack the raw power, video memory and adequate drivers support to be able to run many emulated Nintendo Switch games.
Since AMD and Nvidia GPUs are the most commonly used, when these ASTC textures are encountered they needed to be decoded on the CPU. For many games (such as Super Mario Odyssey) this is not an issue due to a lower texture size being used. However, in games that utilize larger textures, noticeable stutters and pauses in gameplay occur when this CPU decoding takes place.
To solve this problem we had two options. The first was to make CPU decoding multi-threaded, and the second was to write a custom shader allowing for faster ASTC decoding to take place on the GPU. In testing, we found that in order for multi-threaded CPU decoding to be as fast as our GPU decoded solution, you would require 24+ CPU threads. Since the average user does not have access to a CPU with this many threads, multi-threaded CPU decoding was dropped in favor of our GPU approach.
Offloading this task to the lesser utilized GPU made sense in this regard, plus the added benefit of keeping the texture in GPU memory, rather than needing to download the texture to the CPU, decoding it on the CPU, then uploading the decoded texture back to the GPU.
Our initial work on this GPU decoding is looking very promising, below you can find three examples in the aforementioned titles (Astral Chain and Luigi's Mansion 3). In these tests, you can see through the improved gameplay/audio synchronization, just how much faster our new GPU decoded approach is.
While these are examples of games that see a very measurable improvement, you can expect to see much smoother gameplay in any title that utilizes this ASTC texture format.
This decoder is very close to a release, but we have a few additional bugs to iron out. Keep your eyes peeled for updates.
Furthermore, work is also ongoing on both our recent Texture Cache and Buffer Cache rewrites, as well as the Vulkan/OpenGL improvements teased in our last progress report. When we have more info to share, we will do so as soon as possible. Hopefully you enjoyed this mini-update, and once again thank you for your continued support.
- The yuzu development team
Comments
To play LM3, you need to disable the update to the game. Also, you'd better install both mods in the YUZU mod page.
https://yuzu-emu.org/wiki/switch-mods/ try the Disable Dynamic Resolution mod
you guys need to look at the mods page. luigis mansion needs mods to run right
me too
my pc crashes when i play luigi's mansions 3 on yuzu help
Sentario
As 99% of us are aware that yuzu will run fine on 4790k and 960-970gtx it would appear that your just trying to FLEX bahahaha... all good :D
Resolution scaling is on the road map in the near term. We plan to release this feature in the coming months.
For now, we are just sticking with the new shader based implementation. We may consider other options in the future if it becomes more practical to do this on the CPU.
yes cant wait for it
Glenn Røsdal
Will there be 2 modes for us that utilize 24 threads? Looks like it will be a new standard with in 2 years. I my self did buy a 24 threaded one now. I see both Intel and AMD is going that route for multi threading in the future. From what i see on the test videos, it might be a huge leap forward. I my self, test LM3 alot. Seems like one of the main issues in that game is solved from what i see in the video. The delay on cutscenes and in game from time to time. Seems like the audio sync right as well.
Mat Azel
great! can you guys share a roadmap of what it'll take to reimplement internal resolutions upscaling in Yuzu? I bet it is the most wanted feature by a lot of users.
Skitz
Hey, yuzu team just want to say thank you for all your hard work on the amazing emulator and even though I try to keep up with technology my processor doesn't have 24 threads it only has 16 (AMD Ryzen 7 5800x oc@4.4) so I'm glad you didn't take the CPU route, hopefully, my RTX 2080 super will be fast enough to do the work as I've only just upgraded both my GPU and CPU. I will continue to support you on Patreon for as long as I have the extra money to do so. take care and look after yourselves.
That's damn impressive. Y'all are doing great work!
