Final Fantasy 8 -Beetle PSX HW issue

Libretro Cores
#1

Was wondering if anyone else has had these issues. While playing Final Fantasy 8 using OpenGL I run into issues in some areas and during combat. What ends up happening usually is during first initial area (Fire Cavern) the game look normal outside of battle but during battle game just becomes jumbled up textures and models layered over each other and have this effect as if it’s scrolling up. Happens on any resolution above 1x.

Outside of that area when a battle begins (I know the swirl has issues in GL and that can be overlooked as that issue existed in PS2 backwards compatibility) the screen will flicker a few times and then battle continues normally, however when it ends occasionally the camera will stutter or stick and shake back and forth right before fade out and showing earned exp.

I switched the renderer to Vulkan and that handles the regular battles just fine (no shaking or flickering) at basically any resolution EXCEPT the Fire Cavern which just becomes incredibly blurry producing a double vision effect (like being drunk). There have been some out of battle moments where even the Vulkan renderer has had some strange issues however with layering of models and jumbled textures and disappearing text boxes.

Is this just the nature of the emulation of this game or are there some fixes that someone can provide? Particularly for GL as with shaders the game can look absolutely gorgeous.

Here are my specs:

Retroarch 1.7.4 - Beetle PSX HW 0.9.44.1

Windows 10 - 64bit i7-8700k 16GB RAM GTX 1080Ti

I am in the process of getting screenshots and possibly video to show but I am bedridden currently (why I picked up the FF games) so no major hurry or worry I guess.

#2

I played through FF8 a few months back using the Vulkan renderer, and don’t remember any issues at all.

First of all I’d set texture filtering to ‘nearest’ (i.e. off). I had adaptive smoothing turned on (it’s made for games like this), 8x internal res, most other core settings on default.

Post your settings.

#3

For OpenGL 8x res and Super xBR 8x 3D preset

For Vulkan 8x causes the most weird issues. Lowered to 4x using CRT royale preset.

However I tested without shaders on both and issues still occurred. I got some screenshots after my physical therapy I’ll try to post them.

#4

It might be an incompatibility with the PGXP setting…? If that’s on, you might try turning it off, or changing to a different mode.