40 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
40 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
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date = "2016-05-01T21:56:00-05:00"
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title = "Texture Forwarding brings HD output to Citra"
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tags = ["feature-update"]
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author = "jmc47"
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coauthor = "tfarley"
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forum = 35
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One of the big things everyone has been wondering about Citra is when it will be able to render games at HD resolutions.
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One of the great things about emulators is that they can surpass the limitations of the original console, especially
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when it comes to graphical fidelity. With the 3DS specifically, many beautifully detailed games are hidden behind
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staggeringly low resolution screens topping out at 400x240. With **Texture Forwarding** (from tfarley, based on
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yuriks early implementation), Citra can now output games at any resolution, and runs faster as well!
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{{< youtube 7XFcTqoZ3nk >}}
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## What is Texture Forwarding?
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To understand Texture Forwarding, we've created a diagram to show what's actually going on.
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{{< figure src="citra-texture-forwarding.png" >}}
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The diagram is a simplified representation of the actual pipeline, as 3DS games perform multiple additional steps such
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as framebuffer copies between rendering and display - but the concept remains the same. The main idea is to keep
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framebuffers rendered by the HW Renderer as textures on the GPU as much as possible, to avoid the performance overhead
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of transferring them between the CPU and GPU as in the Slow Path. In most instances, the CPU never accesses
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(reads from/writes to) a rendered frame so it can safely stay on the GPU from rendering all the way through to
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ultimate display in Citra. This eliminates CPU/GPU sync points and makes the emulator faster overall.
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In addition to a performance boost, Texture Forwarding also allows the HW Renderer to render and display at higher
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resolutions than the native 3DS when the pixel data is not accessed from anywhere else. But in the event that the
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memory region of some texture is read or written by the CPU, the renderer will fall back to the slow path and
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downsample the texture back to native resolution to ensure that the accesses are reflected accurately.
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If you're interested in seeing just how nice some 3DS games look,
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[HD screenshots have been added to Citra's screenshots page!](https://citra-emu.org/screenshots) Or you can try it
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yourself on your 3DS games by downloading the latest build of Citra from the
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[download's page](https://citra-emu.org/page/download).
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