[Mednafen PSX] 32-bit rendering a possibility?

Libretro Cores
#1

I was wondering if there might be some way to force 32-bit rendering on PSX games. There’s an option to remove the dither, which I assumed would do something like that, but it just seems to actually disable dithering - so you just get really bad posterization in its place.

Since it is somehow possible to disable dithering, would it be possible to force 32-bit rendering on anything which would normally be dithered? An example might be the menus in Symphony of the Night.

[ul] [li]Rendered at 1x with dither - noisy, but shows gradation. [/li][li]Rendered at 1x without dither - dither is replaced with ugly posterization. [/li][li]Rendered at 4x with dither - looks a lot smoother now, but I’m dropping frames even at 2x internal resolution, and the 3D elements in this game look very out of place above 1x. [/li][li]How it would look with 32-bit rendering - gradients replaced in Photoshop. [/li][/ul]

#2

Silent Hill is another good example: [ul] [li]Rendered at 1x with dither - noisy but shows gradation. [/li][li]Rendered at 1x with no dither - dither is replaced with ugly posterization. [/li][li]Rendered at 4x with dither - much smoother gradation, though the game is unplayable [/li][/ul] 32-bit rendering would theoretically still be low-resolution, but look much closer to the 4x dither image. (no image noise, but also no posterization) Would that be possible?

#3

I saw this commit that added a 32bit internal color depth core option. But the core hasn’t been updated on the buildbot since last month, so I haven’t tested it.

#4

Looks like 32-bit rendering is in the GL core and it looks fantastic!

[ul] [li]16-bit Dithered [/li][li]16-bit Dither Disabled [/li][li]32-bit Color [/li][/ul] Obviously there are a lot of rendering and performance issues right now because the GL core is in an alpha state, but this is very exciting.

#5

The 32-bit renderer looks really nice! I use the HW renderer now and then in Chrono Cross, even if the framerate is simply unplayable. That, along with 3-point N64 texture filtering kinda makes it look like an N64 game if played at 1x or 2x native resolution. Given that the performance will increase eventually, I may use it frequently! I don’t know if we can get perspective correction or Z-buffering though. (The gpubladesoft plugin for other PSX emulators have these features, but I don’t know if they’d be hard to implement)