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For the time being you will be able to use 2 GS plugins: GSdx v0.1.16 and GSnull driver v0.1.0.
GSdx v0.1.16 is a DirectX 9 and DirectX 10/11 plugin by Gabest which recently got greatly improved in both speed and image quality. It requires pixel shaders 2 and SSE2 to work and Vista/Windows 7 with a DirectX 10 compliant graphics card for the DirectX10/11 mode.
GSnull is, as the name suggests, a null graphics plugin which will not output any kind of video. It is used for debugging purposes.
Select GSdx v0.1.16 and press the Configure button.
First of all GSdx comes in 4 versions,SSE2,SSSE3, SSE4.1 and AVX. Only IF your processor supports these instruction sets use highest version you can since it will be faster for you in this order from slowest to fastest: SSE2, SSSE3, SSE4.1 and AVX. The new AVX instructions speed up only the software renderers of GSdx and not the hardware ones. Note: AMD users do NOT mistake SSE3 with SSSE3 (1 extra S) and SSE4A with SSE4.1, they are totally different and are NOT supported. In this case use the SSE2 flavor
- SSE2 supporting CPUs: Check here
- SSSE3 supporting CPUs: Check here
- SSE4.1 supporting CPUs: Intel Core 2 Duo Penryn series (E7xxx,E8xxx and Q9xxx models), Intel Corei3, Intel Corei5, Intel Corei7, AMD Bulldozer/Bobcat
- AVX supporting CPUs: Check here
To use the DirectX10/11 mode, you will have to be running Windows Vista or Windows 7 with a DirectX10/11 compliant graphics card(check previous link)
DirectX10 and DirectX11 modes of GSdx for the time being are exactly the same in both terms of speed and compatibility. The only difference is that you will only see the first if your graphics card supports up to DirectX10 and only the second if your graphics card supports up to DirectX11
Renderer: Here you can choose how the graphics will be rendered.
- By selecting "Direct3D9 (Hardware)", GSdx will use the Direct3D capabilities of your graphics card, boosting the emulation speed significantly.
- By selecting "Direct3D10/11 (Hardware)" (only selectable in Vista/Windows 7 with DX10/11 graphics card), GSdx will use its Direct3D10/11 mode which is usually the fastest mode and sometimes even more compatible as well. Highly recommended if your system supports it.
- By selecting "Direct3D9/10/11 (software)", GSdx will use its built-in software renderer, which will not use your graphics card at all, but your processor instead. This way the emulation speed is greatly reduced but you get maximum compatibility. Recommended if you encounter graphics bugs with the Direct3D (Hardware) renderer.
- By selecting "SDL 1.3 (software)", GSdx will use the SDL library for software rendering which behaves as the above software modes.
- By selecting "Direct3D9 (null)", Direct3D10/11 (null)", "Null (software)", "Null (null)" or "SDL 1.3 Null" the plugin will simply not render anything, thus not giving any output on screen. Use it only if you want to e.g. Hear some music since with this mode you get a dramatic speed increase.
- Scaling Subsection:
- Only available if a Hardware Renderer has been selected above. Here you can tweak various settings to improve the visual quality of your games by increasing the resolution the textures are rendered at or applying filtering. Do keep in mind that changing the native resolution of games can cause various glitches (from the usual very minor glitches to more serious ones in rare cases).
D3D internal resolution: Here you can specify the exact resolution you want resources to be rendered at!- This way, if your PC is powerful enough (mainly your graphics card), you can play your favorite ps2 games in much higher resolutions making the graphics crisp and more detailed.
- Note that the higher the resolution, the more resources the plugin will have to use, thus making emulation much slower.
Scaling: Set it to Custom to use whatever you set in the setting below (Custom Resolution). Setting it to 2x-6x will multiply the game's internal resolution by that value and render it. So if a game's native resolution is 640x320, setting this to 3x will render it at 1920x960 (triple of the native resolution). This way some upscaling bugs are prevented which would be present if you set a Custom Resolution in the boxes below.
- At this time most games and graphic cards can do x2 or x3 scaling fine but get a sharp speed drop at higher settings.
- Enable Shade Boost:
- By checking this a new set of options will become available to you via the settings button at the right. Click settings to adjust saturation, brightness and contrast to your liking for the video output of GSdx. You can click the reset button on the lower left to set the sliders to their initial positions.
- Hardware mode Subsection:
- Only available if a Hardware Renderer has been selected above. Here you can change some settings for extra performance or video quality.
- When checked, everything on screen both 2D and 3D will be bilinearly filtered.
- When grayed, filtering will be done as on a PS2. This is the preferred setting.
- When off, bilinear filtering is disabled completely. Lowers video quality but may help some slower graphic cards.
Allow 8-bit textures: Uses more efficient "palletized textures" for all rendering which reduces the graphic card RAM requirements. On the other hand it increases the processing load and can cause visual bugs. Recommended to try both and see which gives you the most performance.
Alpha Correction (FBA): (DX9 mode only) Keep this enabled as it fixes some blending problems that the DX9 mode has. Can also cause some issues.
- Hacks Subsection:
- Only available if you manually edit the GSdx.ini file and change (or add if it does not exist) the line from AllowHacks=0 to AllowHacks=1.
- These settings are ONLY for advanced users that know what they are doing. These settings can and WILL cause serious glitches if used in games that don't need them! (only affect hardware modes).
Skipdraw: Skips drawing some surfaces altogether, based on how likely they are to cause issues. Specify how many surfaces should get skipped after the first problematic one is found. Try lower values first like 1-3 then use higher ones (the highest the number the higher the chance of broken/missing graphics and effects). This hack may cause random speedups as well!
Alpha: Try this if your game has issues with fog like effects or shadows. In general, try it if you get graphics glitches in case it fixes them.
Half-pixel Offset: This hack adds an offset to all surfaces so that some common upscaling issues get reduced. Use this when blur or halo effects seem to appear shifted up-left of where they should be.
Sprite: Read the description at the right panel of the box for more information.
WildArmsOffset: Known to help with lots of games. Read the description at the right panel of the box for more information.
Aggressive-CRC: Read the description at the right panel of the box for more information.
Software mode Subsection:
Only available if a Software Renderer has been selected above. Here you will find options to tweak how many threads the renderer will use and turn on/off the software AA.
Extra Rendering threads: This box is only usable when having selected a software rendering method. Here you can specify how many threads GSdx will use while software rendering, to take advantage of all cores your processor might have, e.g. set it to 3 for quad core processors. Boosts speed significantly in multi-core systems for software rendering with more than 2 cores.
Edge anti-aliasing (AA1): This box is only usable when having selected a software rendering method. When checked, the plugin will try to apply a form of anti-aliasing on the game improving the visuals. Use with caution, pretty much experimental at this time.
Movie Capture: This is a hidden(
) feature. By pressing F12 while running PCSX2 with GSdx a message box will appear. In the first field you must show the plugin where the captured video will be stored, and type the file name too. In the second field you can choose a compression codec like x264vfw or "Uncompressed" which will not compress the video at all. If you choose a compression codec, you will be able to change its settings by pressing the "Config" button. Note that only codecs already installed in your PC will show up.- Press F12 twice at any time to stop the capturing. The video produced will be automatically sped up to 100% for your viewing pleasure
If using SPU2-X, the audio file will be saved as recording.wav in the same folder pcsx2-r5350.exe is in.
GSnull v0.1.0 plugin
As explained at the start of this section this is a Null plugin thus it will not render anything on screen. Press Configure to get a menu with a checkbox where you can check/uncheck "Enable Logging" which will enable/disable GS logging. It should be used for debugging and developers.
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