RPCS3 adds support for ATI Radeon HD 2000, 3000 and 4000 GPUs

RPCS3 has added support for ATI TeraScale 1 graphics cards released between 2007 and 2009. The update covers the Radeon HD 2000, HD 3000 and HD 4000 series, extending support beyond the TeraScale 2-based Radeon HD 5000 and HD 6000 GPUs.

Support is currently limited to Linux systems using the Mesa r600 driver and RPCS3’s OpenGL renderer. TeraScale 1 GPUs officially report support for OpenGL 3.3 and GLSL 3.30, so users must override these values to OpenGL 4.3 and GLSL 4.40 before launching the emulator.

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The developers discovered that RPCS3 assumed all supported GPUs included shader storage buffer object support. TeraScale 1 cards lack this feature, which caused the OpenGL renderer to stop during initialization. A new hardware check now disables the unsupported function and allows the emulator to render correctly.

Testing included the Radeon HD 4890, HD 3870 and HD 2600 XT. The Radeon HD 4890 can run simpler games at playable frame rates, although more demanding titles remain GPU-limited. The Radeon HD 3870 can also run basic games, but some tests required lowering the rendering resolution to 273p.

The Radeon HD 2600 XT can start and render games, but its 256MB of memory and 120 shading units are not enough for acceptable performance. RPCS3 has therefore selected the Radeon HD 2900 XT as the new minimum target, replacing the Radeon HD 5550. Both cards include 320 shading units, four compute units and 512MB of memory.

RPCS3 also retested the Radeon HD 5850 using Persona 5. Performance increased from 35 to 49 FPS in Kamoshida’s castle when comparing a 2021 emulator build with the current version. The school hallway test improved from 19 to 25 FPS on the same AMD FX-8350 system.

For any of the mentioned GPUs on this blog post, you need to be running a Linux distro with the mesa driver r600. Windows drivers are not supported for several reasons, the main one being that AMD’s old orca OpenGL driver, used on Adrenalin drivers prior to 22.6.1, is too poor to function and perform properly with RPCS3.

On TeraScale 1 GPUs (ATI HD 2000/3000/4000) you need to override OpenGL from 3.3 to 4.3 and GLSL 3.30 to 4.40. To do so, you need to launch RPCS3 with the following environment variables:
MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.3 MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=440 ./rpcs3.AppImage

On TeraScale 2 GPUs (ATI HD 5000/6000) do not need any version overrides and you can just launch RPCS3 as is.

We recommend you set Settings -> GPU -> Shader Mode to “Legacy Recompiler (single-threaded)” if you experience stability issues.

Source: RPCS3

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