With the recent de-listing/cease and desist of Citra I am making this topic to try and bring up how the Citra RA core is even more problematic on newer APU’s that are unable to roll back drivers. Currently the Citra retroarch core does not work with Radeon Gpus; extending to iGpus like the 780m. My understanding is, this was caused by the OpenGL driver changes introduced by AMD in Nov 2022.
Citra standalone resolved this by forcing Open GL 4.3 on their builds, where I have tested a temporary solution is rolling the drivers down to 22.6.1 on dGpus, which seem to make the RA core functional. However, this is not possible on many AMD Apus, in Particular 8840u, 7840u, Z1/Z1 extreme or RDNA 3 based iGpus. This is a bit problematic as:
- 780m gpu drivers are often vendor customised (GPD drivers wont work on Aya based 7840u machines)
- Apus are starting to account for many portable handhelds like the Steam Deck or Rog Ally
- They dont have access to older drivers as a temporary fix
- The RA cores can simply be better than using standalone emulators even if they have a performance hit (Standalone does not have the amazing CRT shaders/shaders)
As windows handhelds become more popular, and many like me start using 780m based handhelds as their primary emulation/RA machine, I am left wondering if there are any fixes for the core currently. Last time I checked, there was a planned update being discussed around March 2023, with RA team still unsure how they wanted to tackle this. Currently both Citra & Citra 2018 cores do not seem to work with 780 and VanGogh based iGpus from my testing. I have been a long time lurker of the excellent CRT shader topics here, and the recent death of Citra has urged me to make this post
I also wanted to give a massive thank you to every contributor who has/does work to maintain and develop Retroarch. As a previous standalone emulator user, RA has changed how I interact with my games. Having my entire library, controls and most importantly those CRT shaders and QoL features fuction between multiple platforms have changed how I play games