shadPS4 0.19.0 lands with 205 commits of GPU fixes and online trophies

The PS4 emulator's October release, codenamed The Shadoween special, rewrites signal handling again, reads DLC from ZAR archives and decodes H.265 video. Its compatibility tracker now lists 387 gam...

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shadPS4, the open source PlayStation 4 emulator, tagged version 0.19.0 on GitHub on 2 October under the codename The Shadoween special. It arrives a month and a half after 0.18.0 and carries 205 commits from 30 contributors, the busiest being StevenMiller123, raphaelthegreat, kalaposfos13, squidbus and project lead georgemoralis.

The release post is short on named games on purpose. "The glory goes to the huge amount of GPU fixes that improved so many games, some of them are really playable now," it says, then: "I won't steal the fun of discovering these."

What changed

The core has had its signal emulation rewritten again. DLC can now be loaded from ZAR archives, the single-file format the project adopted in 0.17.0 to replace folders of twenty thousand files, and entitlements are read from RIF licence files. A bug that returned the wrong error when a game tried to create a file in a folder that did not exist has been fixed.

On the library side there is a first, very basic keyboard library, H.265 video decoding in the second video decoder, MP3 packet handling moved onto FFmpeg's parser, a system mapping for camera frames, and trophy names that display correctly. ShadNet, the project's own online backend, gains online trophy support.

The video core is where most of the work went. The buffer cache has been rebuilt around sparse arenas with a reworked memory tracker and batched uploads, the mip layout and detiling of tiled textures has been fixed, and cached images are now invalidated after raw buffer writes. The shader recompiler, which turns the PS4's GCN shader code into something a modern GPU can run, gains virtual registers and an SSA destruction pass, detects divergent loops, lowers wave64 constructs for GPUs that run 32 threads at a time, and handles barycentric attributes properly on non-AMD cards.

Which games benefit

The team's September progress report is the best guide to what those GPU fixes mean in practice, since it covers the development builds that became 0.19.0. It showed The Order: 1886, a PS4 exclusive, reaching the point where some testers finished it, with glitches remaining. Shader recompiler fixes cleared squares from Yakuza 6's menus, stripes from MediEvil's shadows and a double gamma pass in parts of The Last of Us. Attack on Titan 2 was reported playable.

The project's compatibility tracker, which only accepts reports made on numbered releases, lists 387 games as playable at the time of writing, with another 590 reaching gameplay but carrying game-breaking problems. In March, Android Headlines counted 109 on the same list. The days after 0.19.0 brought a run of updated playable reports, among them Gravity Rush 2, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, Bridge Constructor Portal and a batch of Japanese demos.

The tracker's rules are strict about what counts. Reports must come from unmodified dumps of games the reporter owns, with the PS4's own system files dumped alongside, and anything that changes how a game behaves, such as switching on PS4 Pro mode, gets a report closed. Builds are available for Windows, Linux and macOS, and the pre-release channel has already moved on, with nightly builds dated 3, 4 and 6 October on the releases page.

Sources

Image: shadPS4 team

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