Retroarch: Retroarch Freezes before playing 1 or 2 minutes with a video filter activated on PS Vita.

[Nube79]

The option Works great, but freezes retroarch over time.

Description

Retroarch Freezes before playing 1 or 2 minutes with a video filter activated on PS Vita.

Expected behavior

No pay limit, without freezes.

Actual behavior

The system Freezes before short time playing when enable video filter.

Steps to reproduce the bug

1. Load any rom on any core
2. Go to video, and select video filter, select Scale2X filter or other.
3. Play the game some minutes.

Bisect Results

Over time playing with the filter enabled.

Version/Commit

You can find this information under Information/System Information

• RetroArch: ALL Playstiation Vita Versions

Environment information

• OS: Playstation Vita 3.60 and 3.65
• Compiler: All official releases and All nightly published on the site.

Thank you guys for the best emulator ever.

[twinaphex]

@frangarcj Do you know whether this is the case?

[frangarcj]

I can look at it

[Nube79]

thank you guys, we are waiting more than one year for shader support on vita, the video filters are the only solution for post processing now.

[Nube79]

The problem continues on RetroArch 1.7.3

[bparker06]

Please stop bumping the thread

[Nube79]

any news about shader support or filters fix in this two months?

[Nube79]

@frangarcj alguna novedad sobre el tema?

[Nube79]

Tested on the new Retroarch 1.7.4
The video filter problem continues:

0:/ux0:/data/retroarch/filters/video/Scale2x.filt Freezes in 2 minutes.
0:/ux0:/data/retroarch/filters/video/Super2xSaI.filt Freezes in 1 minute.
0:/ux0:/data/retroarch/filters/video/2xBR.filt Freezes in 20 seconds.
0:/ux0:/data/retroarch/filters/video/2xSaI.filt Freezes in 1 minute.

[noradninja]

I am able to run with filters on 1.7.6 (stable) on my PS Vita, however, on my PSTV, the issue remains, any filter enabled will lock RA after the game plays for between 20 seconds and 1 minute.

[Nube79]

@noradninja, the current stable version is 1.7.5, and the problem continues on 1.7.5 stable and the current nightly "2018-10-26_RetroArch.vpk"

Tested with: 0:/ux0:/data/retroarch/filters/video/Scale2x.filt

everything indicates that we will have support for shaders before solving this problem :O

[twinaphex]

Honestly, just don't use the filters for now and wait maybe until shaders get implemented. It's not ideal to use them on something as slow as the PS Vita anyway, you need all the CPU horsepower you can get already.

[Nube79]

ok @twinaphex , the shader revolution is a perfect version for the retroarch PSVita :-D

[noradninja]

@twinaphex Do you have any idea how long we are talking for shader support? Don't want to bug anyone about it as I know its in the pipe.

[Nube79]

I love retroarch, I love rewind, I love the project, shader support for PSVita is the utopia, the perfect version for all the Retroarch user in PSVita platform.

[nezumisama]

I'm sorry for bumping, I just installed a nightly version this Monday (ff410f5) on my VITA and the issue still exists. Retroarch freezes on vita after about a minute when scale2x is enabled, even if no content was loaded (but the Os works, you can exit with the PS button and close the app).

I'm interested in tackling this in spare time, if it's worthwhile. I'd first check if it happens with all filters and if not, which. If it happens with darken (a useless dummy filter made for demonstration), then it's probably a bug in retroarch itself and not in any of the filters. And I'd find the the exact first problematic version, by first bisecting with nightly builds, then I'll setup the right build system and build and try with the remaining few commits. Then I'd report here and see what to do next.

However, I'm not sure if it's worthwhile. The filters should be slow, since not only they aren't ran on GPU, they are just regular C code, no assembly/intrinsic, and I'm not sure if they use multiprocessing (I think they can and do). But I've ran that scale2x one with a gameboy color game (gambatte core), and there were no slowdowns I think, so the console has enough horsepower for at least some filters with some cores. So, whether it's worthwhile or not depends on how close are we to supporting GPU (Cg) shaders on VITA (or if we're already there and I just didn't notice).

So @twinaphex, may I humbly ask, how close are we to getting GPU shaders support on VITA? Or is there just no chance?

[whgang99]

I'm sorry if I'm making a noobish post, but maybe would it be possible implement sort of sharp-bilinear effect by making retroarch to render to sub-native framebuffer? Like, drawing 256x224 SNES game on 790x448 framebuffer and then scaling framebuffer to 960x544 display will provide essentialy the same as normal2x filter.

I would really love to play retro games on vita with sharp-bilinear, but with shader support on vita seeming to be difficult, it will be awesome to see something like that!

[nezumisama]

@whgang99 Do you mean to do it in two steps, nearest-neighbor scaling to some resolution and then bilinear scaling that to the final one?

Also, I think the CPU method seems feasible, if not for the bug and it could be improved by writing the filters with SIMD intrinsic functions (the ARM in VITA supports NEON, which is something similar to SSE2 and later instruction sets on PC/x86) for a major speed up.

[whgang99]

@nezumisama Yes. If I'm aware that's how sharp bilinear works, isn't it?

[Nube79]

I think it's easier to fix the filters bug ...

[twinaphex]

Hi there @nezumisama,

any participation on the Vita port is very much welcomed and needed, we are lacking in developers on that front.

Hope that answers your question, and if you want to discuss further, you could meet us on Discord (I'm known as Autechre on there).

[nezumisama]

@whgang99 I you're referring to Normal2x, that simply doubles the pixels (i.e. for each input pixel, it churns out 4 identical ones). If you combine that with the bilinear option, you'll get what you've described.
@Nube79 Yeah, that's probably right.
@twinaphex Well, I didn't get an answer to my question, but thanks for the reply anyway! I'll be sure to check out the Discord.

[Nube79]

ScummVM has all the Filter Shaders working on PS Vita.
Is it possible to use the code of the shaders for retroarch?
https://github.com/rsn8887/scummvm/tree/vita_1.14

[Nube79]

Closed, the bug has been fixed by Fran.
Thanks.