One of the largest open source emulators of all time just got another significant range of updates today. RetroArch, while often a pain in the arse to configure, is a powerful tool indeed, offering the emulation of many iconic systems and a rather extensive range of features to enhance the experience. Today, they’ve added the fantastic AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution upscaling technology. What’s really awesome, however, is that while AMD FSR is actually done through compute shaders, it’s been added to RetroArch as a pixel shader; that means it’ll work on practically ANYTHING you run there, very interesting indeed.

RetroArch 1.9.9 Released

“AMD FSR as an slang shader for use in RetroArch! This shader should be fully compatible with the following video drivers in RetroArch:

• Metal
• OpenGL Core (or at least 4.0 with regular OpenGL driver)
• Vulkan
• Direct3D 11 (if your card supports Direct3D 11 Feature Level 11.0 or higher)
• Direct3D 12

“We have had to update our Direct3D 11 driver to allow for the use of Shader Model 5.0 when your GPU supports it, since this shader requires SM 5.0 features and wouldn’t work on D3D11 without it.”

If that wasn’t enough, there’s now also HDR (High Dynamic Range) support in RetroArch’s Direct3D 11/12 driver. Of course, how this will perform over various cores will no doubt be on a per-game basis.

“The HDR settings can be found in Settings -> Video when you are using the Direct3D 11 or 12 driver. In order to change to D3D11/12, go to Settings -> Drivers, and change Video to ‘D3D11/12’.

In case you don’t see the option, and you have made sure first that your driver is set to Direct3D 11/12, it might be that HDR is disabled in Windows 10. Make sure HDR is enabled in Windows in case you don’t see it pop up. In Windows, go to ‘Display Settings’ (pictured below) and make sure the HDR setting is turned on. If it doesn’t show up, your display device might simply not support HDR.

We now let Direct3D 11 compile frontend shaders against Shader Model 5.0 (SM 5.0) in case your graphics card driver supports D3D11 Feature Level 11.0 or higher. Previously, it would always compile frontend shaders against Shader Model 4.0, and unfortunately the AMD FSR shader that has just been added needs SM 5.0 capabilities in order to work.

While HDR already works on the UWP version on PC, on Xbox there are currently several deal-breaking display issues with it, so it remains disabled there for now.”

Other fantastic additions today include the RetroArch 3DS port will also be gaining a bottom interactive touchscreen menu for the first time! Added enhanced search functionality to the ‘Cheats’ menu, Faster sinc resampler and audio conversion for ARM NEON platforms AND a huge list of overall fixes and performance improvements.

Either way, I’ll be updating my arcade (again) later today!

Changelog

1.9.9

• 3DS: Add bottom touchscreen menu
• 3DS/SAVESTATES: Save and load save states to and from RAM
• AUDIO/MIXER: Ensure than menu sounds are re-enabled when calling CMD_EVENT_AUDIO_REINIT
• AUDIO/RESAMPLER/MIXER: Fix menu sounds (audio mixing) when using the ‘sinc’ resampler with quality lower than ‘normal’
• AUDIO/CONVERSION/ARM NEON: Add intrinsic NEON versions for float_to_s16/s16_to_float – should lead to optimized codepaths for AArch64/ARMv7 architectures without being dependent on ASM codepaths.
• AUDIO/RESAMPLER/ARM NEON: Add intrinsic NEON version for lanczos sinc function – should lead to optimized codepaths for AArch64/ARMv7 architectures without being dependent on ASM codepaths.
• CHEEVOS: Upgrade to rcheevos 10.2
• CHEATS: Add enhanced search functionality to the ‘Cheats’ menu
• CHEATS/RUNAHEAD: Fix cheats when using second instance runahead
• CONFIG: Add option to (force-)write current core options to disk (Quick Menu)
• CORE INFO CACHE: Remove core path from core info cache. Should make core info caches portable now (for example: you can move RetroArch to a separate dir and they would still work).
• D3D11: Use Shader Model 5.0 for frontend shaders if D3D11 Feature level is at least 11.0 or higher. Should fix some new shaders that require SM 5.0 (like AMD FSR)
• D3D11: Add HDR support (not working for Xbox for now)
• D3D12: Add HDR support (not working for Xbox for now)
• EMSCRIPTEN: Fixed web player bug with filesystem and runtime
• INPUT/OVERLAY: Fix overlay input when analog to digital mapping is enabled
• INPUT/UDEV: Look for “ID_INPUT_KEY”, not “ID_INPUT_KEYBOARD”
• INPUT/WINRAW: Fix crash when overlay is enabled
• MAC/METAL: Add Discord RPC support
• MENU: Allow ‘Custom Aspect Ratio (X Position)/(Y Position)/(Width)/(Height)’ to be entered manually via keyboard
• MENU: Allow ‘Vertical Refresh Rate’ to be entered manually via keyboard
• MENU/SHADERS: Highlight currently selected value in Shader Parameter drop-down lists
• STABILITY: Safer way of avoiding the race condition in audio_driver_sample/audio_driver_sample_batch – we can check audio-suspended to see if we’re doing a fs/windowed toggle – enhances stability when fullscreen toggling/tearing down context
• STABILITY: When audio driver write callback function fails, don’t turn audio off completely – look if audio_driver_output_samples_conv_buf is non-NULL first before we attempt to write audio – enhances stability when fullscreen toggling/tearing down context
• STABILITY: Input robustness for cores that use internal threading (full teardown/setup), no audio should be processed at this point in time
• VIDEO: Screen resolution list sanitizing
• VULKAN: Fix some Vulkan validation layer errors
• UWP: Updated icons courtesy of Danp142
• UWP/XBOX: Disable CPU model check on Xbox as it doesn’t work and can even crash
• UWP/VFS/XBOX: Code cleanup and simplification of UWP VFS driver

Find out more here!