Demul v0.7 alpha build 180428 - Updated 28/04/18

[Gensei]

I tried this version and indeed it corrected shenmue 2 graphical glitches with its Zbuffer fix (I have an ATI GPU so I could see these improvements in particular in GD3 and GD4). Demul seems to provide a better widescreen support for shenmue II. I hope they'll release source code for these new builds in order to allow motivated developpers to give their help (unfortunately I'm not a developper). I really hope they'll reactivate texture scaling in their next release (I'm a bit impatient I know that xD).
I'd love to see shenmue II running in 1080P x3 without glitches. I could read (in their git) they deactivated texture scaling for precision. althought a X3 scaling shader made by them could do the job as well because they wouldn't have to reactivate it in their GPU plugin (I think). Or they could even add their new fixes in their old GPU plugin to make an alternate GPU plugin.

[Esppiral]

Ok so I tried it with an AMD r9 380x (latest drivers) and whenever I enable the auto sort option the emulator crashes, any ideas?

[Snoopbob2006]

Anyone know of any updates?

[Mr357]

I'd love to see shenmue II running in 1080P x3 without glitches.

With the top NVIDIA cards, it's very possible. I switched from a 290X to a 980Ti and can run most parts of Shenmue II at 3x with 32/64 layers. Unfortunately, AM2 went pretty nuts with the dusts effects in Shenmue II, so you get frequent slowdowns (most scenes with Joy, Wong QTE chase, Iron Palm practice, etc.).

[Radar]

Anyone know of any updates?

Do you expect anything in particular?
Some new arcade games were dumped/added, Initial D Card Reader got emulated, some progress with NAOMI communication board..

But no public release yet.

[BlueMue]

What we need is increased performance. I can already be very happy with the emulation quality but it's so unoptimized and takes so much juice.

[Peter]

Really? Out of curioisity, what are you guys running? I'm going nuts with anticipation to start my first build this week! Can't wait to jump into Demul and kiss NullDC goodbye.

[BlueMue]

What we need is increased performance. I can already be very happy with the emulation quality but it's so unoptimized and takes so much juice.

I wish it too, but it's not so simple, from information I gathered from developers:

Dreamcast have an unusual graphic card, it supports technology called OIT(Order-independent transparency) unfortunately non of today's PC or Mobile graphic cards fully supports it. With DirectX 11 it became possible to emulate this feature, but with the way it works, it requires lots and lots of GPU resources! That's why in NullDC without it Ryo have transparent hair and stuff.. +Other graphical things, that unlike NullDC Demul renders properly, like hardware shadows,Multiple-Pass Rendering,Bump mapping,second accumulation buffer and etc. NullDC either doesn't render them properly or simply ignores them.

So I wouldn't call it unoptimized, it's just that NullDC have more "speedhacks" and glitches as a result.

Really? Out of curioisity, what are you guys running?

Running what? You mean system specs?

[Peter]

Haahaa yea. Just to see if my build will be ok to support Demul.

[Mr357]

Really? Out of curioisity, what are you guys running? I'm going nuts with anticipation to start my first build this week! Can't wait to jump into Demul and kiss NullDC goodbye.

I have an i7 2700K clocked @ 4.6GHz and an MSI "Gaming" 980Ti at stock (1140MHz, but it boosts to something like 1350).

The two things I do to achieve a steady 30fps (when possible) are to set Demul's process priority to "high" in the Windows Task Manager, and in the case of recording, frame rate dips get wiped out almost entirely if you play through a particular segment and then reset or soft reset Demul, then run through the segment again. This is what I had to do for Shenmue: The Movie Remastered, so I effectively played the game twice. When I made mistakes, I sometimes had to go through an entire day three or four times.

[Peter]

Nice!!! I can't wait to get into it!

I settled on an i7 4790k with a 970. The 980 is a little out of my price range right now but I will look into a 1080 around Christmas time as a treat for myself. I'd say I will be up and running by the end of next week. Ordered all of my components today so just waiting on them being delivered. That's when I start bombarding you wit messages about working on Shenmue 2 the movie

What exactly is it that causes the rate to drop? Are we talking strictly the GPU? I love that dedication though man. Reminds me of the 100% notebook repeats. It's like grinding for Shenmue.

[Mr357]

What exactly is it that causes the rate to drop? Are we talking strictly the GPU? I love that dedication though man. Reminds me of the 100% notebook repeats. It's like grinding for Shenmue.

Unfortunately, I can't say for sure, but I assume it's something to do with the cache. Although I said to (soft) reset Demul, the method still works if you close it and reopen without restarting or turning off your PC. I'm sure it's no simple matter, but the problem most likely lies with how the Demul team chose to have the program fill its cache. My guess is that it initially writes the cache too slowly, but if you go for a second attempt, you've already got it available and can draw all of the frames more quickly.

This trick does help to mitigate frame rate drops on scenes with dust/smoke effects, but sometimes its simply too much for the emulator to handle, even if you reduce your internal resolution to 2x. Dropping from 64 layers to 32 can help as well, but it's usually not worth it since not having those layers can cause glitches (hence why you would have been using 64 in the first place).

For Shenmue I, I recommend 16 layers, with 32 as needed (only a few times throughout the game).
For Shenmue II, you'll usually need 32, and sometimes 64 depending on what effects are on screen.

[Peter]

Bloody hell. I know on every official release (and bootleg) there is a frame rate dip in the QTE sequence through the markets in the White Dynasty Quarter going after Zhang. When you knock a Yellow Head into one of the stalls and the dust flies everywhere it slows up something awful, even on the Xbox.

[BlueMue]

I'm running a GTX 970 and a 2600k. Used to run at 4.4 GHz but I recently backed down to the regular 3.8 since it's running pretty hot and it deserves some nice days this late in its life.

Demul is definately more taxing on the GPU then it is on the CPU. The latter is usually around 15% load in my case. Now the GPU isn't pushed all that far either during normal gameplay, chilling at around 30% but of course it can spike up a lot when transparency comes into play. What it definately pushed is the VRAM. At 3x resoltion and 64 layers I got a use of 3170 MB.

When it comes to framerate dips during loading screens or other transitions that it can help to set the GPU to always full power in the settings. I can only speak for Nvidia but it keeps the clockspeeds high when it would normally drop during these low load situations, wich doesn't turn out too well sometimes. My 970 doesn't exhibit this problem but it helped when I was recording on my old 670.

[Radar]

Got i7 4790 + GTX 760. Usually running on 3x resolution and 16x layers, causes glitches when there's lots of smoke, but during normal game play I personally didn't notice any visual differences if I set amount of layers higher, I wonder if there's actually any?.

When it comes to framerate dips during loading screens or other transitions that it can help to set the GPU to always full power in the settings. I can only speak for Nvidia but it keeps the clockspeeds high when it would normally drop during these low load situations, wich doesn't turn out too well sometimes. My 970 doesn't exhibit this problem but it helped when I was recording on my old 670.

Yeah, Speaking of.. I heard it's a common issue on AMD Radeon cards. so it has to be set to high speed mode or whatever AMD has there

BTW, A little tip: Press INSERT to disable framelimit(VSYNC must be turned off)