Nearly six months after the release of PCSX2 2.4.0, we are excited to unveil PCSX2 2.6.0! We’re even more excited to showcase the things that we have been working on.
New Year - New Build
Now that the dust has settled down from our biggest single release to date, we decided to step back a bit and give more love and attention to the interface, quality of life features and accessibility. There are also more performance improvements to be seen, which we are very excited to show you! Our contributors have been hard at work further refining the foundation that has been laid out since 2.0.0 to make PCSX2 more accessible to everyone!
Major New Features
Better Feature Parity Between Big Picture Mode and Qt Interface
SternXD has been on a mission to achieve feature parity between Big Picture Mode and the Qt interface. Thanks to his work, you can now adjust Network & HDD Settings, create a Memory Card, as well as login to RetroAchievements directly from Big Picture Mode!

New icon for RetroAchievements Qt login dialog (#13718)
Alongside Big Picture Mode getting a new RetroAchievements login dialog, Qt’s login dialog also gets a small facelift! It now shows the actual RetroAchievements icon instead of a generic login icon.

Korean Game Titles
Despite having nearly 700 known NTSC-K serials, the GameDB has for a long time only had Latin versions of the titles. These titles were pulled from the NTSC-U/PAL name or from a Romaji version of the Japanese name. PCSX2 now has 100% complete Korean translation on our Crowdin (at the time of writing), a milestone which has been a long time coming. TheTechnician27 has been working on adding Korean game titles to most NTSC-K serials which did not previously have them.
note
If you have spotted any inaccuracies with the Korean game titles, please report such problems on our GitHub issue tracker.
Game Shortcut Creation Feature
KamFretoZ set his sights on adding the ability to create desktop (or start menu) shortcuts for your games from inside PCSX2. Motivated by this GitHub issue and lots of feedback on Discord, this was a very popular ask from users!
info
This feature is only available for Windows and Linux at this time.
tip
This feature can be accessed by right-clicking the game you want to make the shortcut with on the game list and selecting “Create Game Shortcut”.

Custom Background Support
What started as a silly idea between KamFretoZ and JordanTheToast to see what’s possible with Qt, ended up becoming a full blown feature. With this, you can now set a custom background (even animated ones too!) on your game list to your heart’s content.


Emoji Support for Big Picture Mode
Allows emojis to be shown in Big Picture Mode and the fullscreen pause menu. RetroAchievements popups would often use emojis; these are now able to render as well.
Not all emojis are supported; this is a limitation of ImGui, the library we use for this.
For the longest time, our Big Picture Mode UI was unable to display emoji due to limitations with ImGui. This was especially apparent when displaying emojis from certain RetroAchievements sets. Thanks to ImGui fixes and AirGamer’s efforts, we have finally implemented emoji support in PCSX2’s Big Picture Mode.
On a more technical level, previous version of ImGui required us to provide ranges of characters we needed. ImGui would then generate a font atlas from this. This required that we either hardcode, or generate these ranges for any languages we support in PCSX2. With ImGui 1.9.21, we can now rely on ImGui to dynamically adjust its font atlas on its own, removing the maintenance burden of fixed character ranges.
Before:

After:

Big Picture Mode Icon Refresh
Big Picture Mode just got a small facelift! You might have noticed inconsistencies where some options had an icon while others did not. Now, every settings entry has an icon to go along with it.
Additionally, we can add emoji as icon too! 🔥
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Various Blending and Hardware Renderer Improvements
GS/Direct3D12: Added Feedback Reads Support
Upon looking through the Direct3D12 documentation, it was found that aliased resources (two resources sharing the same memory) could be used to bind the same texture as both a shader resource and render target. This relies on the two resources being able to inherit data from each other, the requirements of which can be satisfied using simultaneous access textures.
This allows us to speed the Direct3D12 renderer up substantially, with some systems seeing over 5x improvements on specific games.
Loading Chart Data
While NVIDIA and Intel Arc GPUs had no issues, lightningterror discovered that some AMD GPUs showed issues. While the Direct3D12 documentation implies that data inheritance should work even with undefined memory layouts, the texture layout needed to be specified for some generations of AMD GPUs. Once this issue was identified it was fortunately an easy fix to implement.
While reviewing the code, lightningterror spotted and fixed a regression with handling stencil DATE one.
There have also been other enhancements to the hardware renderer where games such as Enthusia gained a significant 9% improvement in Direct3D11.
Loading Chart Data
GS/Direct3D11/12: Support Multidraw Framebuffer Copy
Add implementation for Multidraw Framebuffer Copy for Software Blending, Framebuffer Masking, Software Destination Alpha Testing. In order to replicate the current behavior on our more accurate renderers such as Vulkan and OpenGL without the use of Texture Barriers, LightningTerror discovered that we can achieve the same accuracy with the use of Texture Copies albeit at a slightly higher performance cost compared to using barriers which Direct3D11 doesn’t support. Direct3D12 does and such implementation is already implemented later on by AirGamer.
To give a bit of context why we need copies/barriers, it is because a texture cannot be bound at the same time as a render target view and shader resource view, a copy is created from the same render target so we can have two separate textures with the same data instead of using the same one which is a hazard, Vulkan and OpenGL use texture barriers that nullifies the need for a copy which allows one texture to be used for both.
To alleviate some of the performance hit, we later on added some optimizations which will be mentioned in the report.
To keep it short this makes Direct3D11/12 as accurate as Vulkan and OpenGL.
Here is some comparisons for those looking for visuals. It will be almost impossible to post all the fixes games since there are a lot, so here’s just a few:

BeforeAfter
BeforeAfter
GS/Direct3D11/12: Implement Depth Testing and Sampling
Similar to our issue with software blending, our old implementation for depth testing and sampling used copies for Direct3D11/12 to avoid the texture binding hazards being bound as a depth stencil view and shader resource view at the same time. However when we use a depth texture if we are not writing anything to the depth buffer in the case where both the source and destination texture are the same we can bind them at the same time:
In Direct3D11’s case we create and bind a new read-only depth stencil view, simultaneously also binding the same texture and binding it as a shader resource view which allows us sampling depth in the shader, but no writing to the depth buffer which is unnecessary.
In Direct3D12’s case we just transition the texture to be read only which also allows us to bind it both as a depth stencil view and shader resource view at the same time.
Some nice benchmarks showing the difference in cutting off the texture copies that we previously used:
GS: Texture Copies and Barriers Optimizations



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In #13276 and #13298 following the implementation of software blending on Direct3D11, LightningTerror decided to improve the function itself that deals with texture copies. Some optimizations that were previously not present on OpenGL, Direct3D11 and Metal were backported from Direct3D12 and Vulkan which reduces the number of copies in some specific scenarios, and aborting invalid copies. This gave us a small boost in some games that used texture copies regardless of renderers as copies were required.




