Full PCSX2 Graphics Guide | Every Option Explained & Best Settings for PlayStation 2 Emulator PS2

in this video I'm going to show you how to upscale and enhance your PlayStation 2 games using the pcsx2 emulator now unlike other guides I'm not just going to show you a couple of options and then leave you to your own devices I'm going to be breaking down and explaining every single video option I'm even going to show you exactly what they look like and give you side by-side examples if needed so by the end of the video you're going to know what all of these options do and more importantly what they look like towards the end of the video I'm also going to show you how to save all of this on a per game basis which is advisable because some of these enhancements may look good for some games but they could break others so pcsx2 is a little bit complicated in places and I am going to be going a bit more in depth in those areas there's quite a bit to cover and discuss so let's just get straight into it so obviously you want to start pcsx2 up then you want to go into settings and we're going to begin with interface now for the most part you are good on defaults here but for obvious reasons you may want to start in full screen and hyi cursor when in full screen now we can move on to the graphics tab before we get into these settings there's a couple of things that I need to mention the first thing is it's a good idea to check in your performance as you're changing these settings PCS X2 is quite resource hungry especially when you're enhancing and upscaling so you want to go over to OSD which is onscreen display and turn the majority of these on this lets you check everything as you're changing your settings to see if you're pushing things too far secondly pcsx 2 for the most part at least really does know best a huge part of the pcsx2 project is figuring out which of these settings is compatible for each individual game which is no small feet considering the size of the library and if you are using an incompatible setting nine times out of 10 the emulator will tell you in the top left hand corner and if there's a better setting you could be using again it should tell you in the top left now that we've got that out of the way we can move on to renderer at the top here and we've got four Hardware renderers and two software renderers null at the bottom is only used by debuggers so if you're only playing games pretend this one doesn't exist now software obviously isn't using Hardware acceleration and as a result you can't use the majority of the enhancements with it so this tends to be used as a backup if none of the hardware renderers work which is pretty rare now with these four Hardware renderers some of these work better than others so you should be prioritizing using Vulcan first because it performs the best however it is the least compatible so if it doesn't work with a game I'll then fall back onto openg GL and if that doesn't work or if it's too performance heavy I would then fall back onto one of the direct 3D drivers but you should be prioritizing Vulcan and openg GL first because direct 3D's blending capability isn't as good you can if you want set this to automatic but I recommend setting your preferred renderer this makes it easier for troubleshooting just because you know for sure which one is being used and for this video I'm going to be using vol adapter is your graphics hardware and I recommend leaving nothing to a chance and selecting your main GPU the rest of these options are now in these nice convenient tabs and we're going to start with display right at the top with full screen mode and borderless full screen is definitely the one you should be using however if you are using one of the direct 3D drivers you do have access to all of these different display modes if you need them the use case for these is super specific and if you're just using a normal display you should most definitely be using borderless for screen so moving on to aspect ratios and fit to window SL full screen is essentially stretch to fit so it will take a 4x3 or a 3x2 image and stretch it to fill the entire screen I'm not the biggest fan of doing it that way but it's there if you want to use it auto standard 4x3 for interlaced and 3x2 for Progressive is how things are supposed to look if you're not using widescreen standard 4x3 is used if you want to force 4x3 onto 3x2 progressive scan games for whatever reason and WID screen 16x9 you only have a need to set for games that have native anamorphic widescreen options just make sure that you turn those on in the actual ingame options do keep in mind that this is anamorphic widescreen which means that it's taking the adjusted 16x9 image squishing that into 4x3 and then stretching it into 16x9 so we are getting stretch pixels on the x-axis but that's just a sacrifice we make for widescreen now I can't talk about WID screen without then talking about the enabled widecreen patches option towards the bottom here this option is essentially hacking anamorphic widecreen to games that were made without widescreen in mind and for me personally PS2 widescreen hacks work really really well and the best thing about this option is that it automatically applies 16 by9 so when you enable it you know that the correct aspect ratio is always going to be applied now because not every single game has a widecreen patch if one isn't Det protected when this option is active it will fall back and use whatever you've set for your default aspect ratio here to simplify the whole widescreen thing I'm going to show you how to set things up so you can play as many games in WID screen as possible so you want to leave enable widescreen patches on by default and don't forget this will also set 16x9 for us so for the most part simply activating this option will take care of most of your widecreen needs but there are some native widecreen games out there that don't actually have a widecreen patch and for those you will need to set wide screen up on a per game basis so in the description below I'm going to put a link to every single widescreen PlayStation 2 game so if your game doesn't have a widescreen patch you can check to see if it's on this list here and if it is you can just turn the wi screen options on in the in-game settings and make sure that you set 16x9 up in the emulator on a per game basis which I'll show you how to do towards the end of the video moving down to FMV and aspect ratio and this comes in handy when we're using widescreen some widescreen games will also adjust their FMV sequences for proper 16x9 other games will simply stretch their 4x3 FMV sequence into 16x9 and if that bugs the crap out of you like it does me we can force those into 4x3 by setting Auto standard or just standard 4x3 de interlacing is probably the most important aspect when it comes to making PS2 games look good on Modern digital displays this is the option that everybody tends to get confused about so I'm going to break it down as best I can and show you the easiest way to remove the interlacing for every game so the vast majority of the PS2 Library uses an interlaced presentation which broke the image up into two separate fields of lines and alternated between the two to present its image and this method was only ever intended for CRTs so when this is being displayed on a digital display it really doesn't know what to do with it as a result some Extreme Measures do need to be taken to merge those alternating lines to present a sharper image and there's three different ways we can do this the first and best way to remove the interlacing is to see if your game has a native progressive scan mode some games were made with progressive scan in mind but these are few and far between so to make that easier I'm going to put a link in the description below that will take you to a list of every single progressive scan game so if your game is on this list all you need to do is turn progressive scan on in the actual in-game options and because pcsx2 is awesome as soon as it detects a progressive scan image it will automatically disable any dentling options that you might have on because they're simply not needed which means that all you need to do is turn progressive scan on in the in-game options and you don't need to touch any other deing options because not all games have a progressive mode the second way we can remove the interlacing is by enabling the no interlacing patches this is essentially hacking de interlacing into games that don't have a progressive scan mode but just like the widescreen patches the no intering patches can also apply to games that have native progressive scan modes and all the patch does is turn those in-game options on for you the third way we can remove it is by using this deating option here and if we click on this drop- down list we've got a bunch of different algorithms we can choose from to help merge those into Laing Lines no interlacing is just a way to turn it off but I very much recommend that you leave this on automatic and that's because pcsx2 nine times out of 10 is going to know which one is best for your specific game for those one in 10 times where the emulator doesn't know best you can select one of these to see if it works any better now I'm not going to show you these because the whole idea is is that you're not meant to see them and there really isn't a best option it's just which one is working best with your game now don't be intimidated by this list whilst you're playing a game if you press F5 you can cycle through them making it really easy to figure out which one looks best so I'm just going to simplify the whole deining thing and show you my preferred method on how to use it so you want to leave the no intering patches on by default and we're going to let this either hack the interlacing or for the native progressive scan games simply turn all of those in-game options permanently on and if no patch is found it will fall back onto this DN interlacing option which we've set as automatic this will give you the best chance of removing the de interlacing in the best way possible without having to mess around with your settings and for those very rare occasions where a game doesn't have a patch and the automatic deating option doesn't work you can then cycle your way through these to find the best one now disabled interlacer offset is more of a fine tune adjustment and should really only be used if you're forced into using one of these algorithms for deining and this can help further reduce blurriness in some situations so if you found a game where pretty much none of these are really doing the job and completely removing the interlacing you can activate this and it may help things but it is 50/50 if it's going to work or not now that we've got Dent Laing finally done out of the way everything else is far more straightforward so with bilinear filtering this is the same as applying a smooth or a sharp filter across the entire screen you generally don't want to choose none cuz choosing one of these also organizes the spaces between pixels moving down to Vertical stretch and this one can go in both directions it can both squash and it can stretch and this can come in handy for users that are outputting to a weird display and you need to sort out your proportions it can also come in handy for widescreen games that can sometimes squash or stretch themselves a little bit when in widecreen mode cropping comes in handy for games that still show a little bit of their overscan area despite show overscan being turned off and these will often appear as garbage lines of pixels around the edge of the screen and you can remove lines of pixels from any Edge that you want with this function cropping is something you want to do on a per game basis because if you do need to crop it's rarely going to be the same for every game now we've already covered the wide screen and the inating patches so we can move on to anti- blur activating this does remove the blurring effect that was often used in the development of PlayStation 2 games and this blurring effect was definitely only intended for CRTs so even though when this is active it's less accurate to PS2 rendering it does make it look a lot better for digital displays which is why it's on by default out of the box Fe sync we all know what that does activate it if you don't want any screen tearing and we've already gone over disabled interlace offset now screen offsets I do need to go a bit more in depth with this one because it's quite hard to identify when you need to enable it and you definitely want to leave it off by default so when when this is disabled pcsx2 is emulating a fixed screen position however some games use screen position offsets to move the screen for certain effects like wipeout Fusion screen shake so if screen offsets is off for a game that needs it on certain screen effects may not appear as they should but doing that for certain games can have way more detrimental and more difficult to identify effect now the most egregious example I can find of this is definitely Grant rismo 4 when in 1080 IM mode and you're staring left and right you get this weird blurring effect but it only happens in third person mode it doesn't happen at all when you're in first person so something weird is going on but after looking at the screen on the right hand side I noticed that the entire goddamn image was moving a few pixels to the right so the light bulb went off this game is using screen offsets but this game only uses screen offsets for these particular effects when in 108i mode which isn't confusing at all so not all screen offset issues are going to present themselves in the same way and if screen offsets is messing with something how it's messing with it depends on the implementation of that particular screen effect and for the most part you're probably not even going to notice even if a game has an issue with screen offsets but every now and then you are going to come across a game like Gran Turismo 4 where you're just like what the hell so for those types of games that are seemingly blurring for no particular reason you can try turning screen offsets on on a per game basis show overscan obviously shows the overscan area which you're not actually meant to see now that we've got the display tab all done and out the way with we can move on to rendering and with your internal resolution obviously the higher you set this the better the graphics are going to look not only does it increase the resolution of all of the assets it also gets rid of the jaggies to a certain extent without the need for anti-aliasing so I'm going to cycle through the most used resolutions so you can take a look for yourself M mapping is way too complicated to explain for this video and it would just take way too long and it's not really a visual enhancement option it's more of an accuracy option so the higher you set it the more accurate it's going to be but the more resources is going to eat up but I definitely recommend leaving this on automatic as some games need one of these to be set specifically so leave it on automatic and let pcsx2 do its thing moving on to texture filtering and you're probably looking at this thinking haven't we already covered bilinear filtering and the answer is yes but in postprocessing so this bilinear filtering option in the display tab applies itself to the entire image after everything's gone through the renderer now these two filtering options control the texture filtering as it's going through the renderer and the kind of filtering we're talking about is the filtering that was applied by the developers of the actual game the majority of PS2 games uses bilinear filtering but there are some games out there that use trilinear filtering instead and both of these were used to help smooth out sharp pixel edges on low resolution textures filtering isn't appli to every asset in the game is used more on a where it's needed kind of basis and between these two settings we can either turn it on or off for both bilinear and trilinear games but we can also Force bilinear filtering onto trilinear filtered games and vice versa the only reason you would ever change any of this is if you're really picky with your presentation and I recommend that you leave this on B a PS2 and default automatic because if you have anything else set you can break the rendering in various ways but this is an in-depth guide so I've still got to show you all of these settings just in case you're the py type so this texture filtering option here contains all of the bilinear options and when this is set to bilinear PS2 it means that bilinear filtering is only being applied to bilinear PS2 games when bilinear forc is set it means that bilinear filtering is being forced to every single game including the trilinear games setting nearest is the equivalent of turning bilinear filtering off because it doesn't use any smoothing effects now this trilinear filtering option contains pretty much the same options as the bilinear stuff but of course it only applies to the tri linear fielded games and you should definitely be leaving this on automatic and let pcsx2 do its thing and a a Tropic filtering is essentially anti-aliasing and it helps get rid of the jaggies especially at extreme viewing angles and we've got up to 16x available obviously the higher you set this the more jaggies are going to be reduced but the more performance it's going to eat up so set this with your performance expectations dithering on PlayStation 2 is nowhere near as much of an issue as it was on Playstation 1 and if a game does have a dithering pattern you'll be hard pressed to actually see it but there are some extreme cases where you may want to scale the dither ring or turn it off entirely and again we're using Gran Turismo 4 as an example in its 1080i mode for some reason when this game is in its 108i mode it applies loads of dithering to all of the gradients and this is most noticeable with the gradients in the sky for me personally I like to turn the dithering off and remove that dithering pattern entirely now blending accuracy obviously controls the blending accuracy of the frames of animation and for the most part you are going to be good on basic recommended and if a particular game does look better with a higher setting PCS 62 will tell you which one in the top leftand Corner the emulator is pretty obsessive about this setting so you can pretty much guarantee that it's always going to suggest the best one however if you are on high-end hardware and performance isn't really an issue for you you can go ahead and set this to full or maximum to save having a faf around with those settings texture preloading is a performance option and you definitely want this onf now spin GPU and spin CPU during rebacks are again performance options and you should really only use these if if you're playing a game for a really long time and you don't want your CPU or your GPU to go into a power save mode now that we're all done with the rendering tab we can move on to the postprocessing tab and everything in here is really the icing on the cake and we're going to start with the contrast adaptive sharpening now this is the Fidelity FX contrast adaptive sharpening that's made by AMD however it works with both AMD and Nvidia cards which is awesome so basically it's one of the new fangled adaptive algorithms that's meant to help increase your FPS in normal PC games whilst retaining your visual Fidelity but its inclusion with pcsx2 isn't necessarily for performance reasons it's mainly used as an additional way to help sharpen up your games so you got two different options to choose from you can sharpen only for the internal resolution or you can sharpen and resize for your display resolution which is probably the one you should be using and you can also change how sharpness is being applied on the right hand side here but for the most part I keep it off by default and only turn it on for the games that absolutely need it now FXAA is anti-aliasing not to be confused with anisotropic filtering which is really only meant for extreme viewing angles this function is more of a general purpose anti-aliasing and for me it goes on and it stays on and last but not least we have filters SL shaders now there's a million different shaders out there for a bunch of different reasons but but their main application is for CRT effects so they're really used by people that like to keep more of an authentic original look for me because I like to upscale and enhance everything I want the cleanest possible image and as a result shaders and filters with this emulator at least are not for me but if you're into that authentic original look scan lines and down sampling and all of that other stuff you can go ahead and use these I'm going to cycle through a couple so you know what's here but ultimately you can just download your own and use those for any reason whatsoever now shade boost I don't really actually consider to be a filter it allows you to independently change the brightness contrast and the saturation of the image I generally don't tend to use this but I know that it's there if I really need it now that we've covered pretty much every single visual option I do just want to quickly give some advice on how you have your defaults now you can obviously set these to however you'd like but you may need to factor in performance now some people like to have all of this at default settings with all of the enhancements turned off and then incrementally turn it all on for every game that they play other people such as myself like to turn the majority of the enhancements on and then dial it back if I need to so the way I have my default set up is the best way to get all of these enhancements automatically applied it is the laziest way but in my opinion it's also the best way so if you want to copy my settings I'm just going to go through my tabs now the only one that you may want to change is the blending accuracy I leave this on full because I can't be able to change it all the time and I've got the hardware to do it but you may need to set it on basic if you're on Lower End Hardware changing all your settings per game is easiest from a maximized window so go back up to interface and make sure that double click toggles full screen is active then all you want to do is actually start your game once it's started up double click to go to Window mode and then you can maximize this window once you found a good spot in game you want to go up to settings and go to game properties and any changes that we make here will only be saved and applied for this game only so if we go down to the graphics tab on the left hand side you can see that it contains all of those same settings now I do need to explain quickly how these buttons work specifically for game properties so if there's a gray box it means that it's using the global defaults if there's a tick it means that it's on for this game only and if it's a black box it means that it's off of this game only I know that I've got this on by default and that's how I want it so I'm going to leave it as a gray box so from here you can change any of these settings to your heart's content and it'll be updated immediately so let's go over to rendering let's change the internal resolution down to 1x and as you can see it's updated straight away and that will happen for all of these settings so I fully recommend that you play around with these settings to figure out what you like and what you don't don't like and keep an eye on your performance as you're doing it and obviously you can use all of this for troubleshooting or just for testing also from this game properties window you can check to see if your game has any patches just click on the patches tab on the left hand side now if you've got wide screen and no installating patches on in your defaults you shouldn't need to turn these on but on occasion they don't catch them so it's good practice to turn these on in addition if you really want them on now this game also has a disabled blur patch but if you remember we're using the internal disabled blur hack instead but when we enable this it should override it depending on the game that you're playing you may have a bunch of different patches that you can choose from from simple fixes to full 60 FPS hacks so it's a good idea to always check these just to see what you can do with your particular game now once you finished playing around with your settings you can close this window and just double click to go back to full screen mode now you can change your settings from the actual pause menu and then go to game properties but unfortunately this doesn't contain every single option so that's why I prefer to do it from a maximized window so doing it this way instead doesn't just give you access to every single option it also allows you to see all your changes take place in real time without having a menu bash but if I quickly just need to change one setting I will use the pause menu now before I close out the video I do want to reemphasize how much effort goes into by the team to figure out which of these settings works for each individual game considering the library is over 4,000 games large and for the most part it's impossible to Break Stuff these days you can only enhance and make it look better all of those advanced settings that you shouldn't be touching are now completely taken care of these days pcsx2 is pretty much pick up and play there we go that was my breakdown of pretty much every single graphical option for pcsx2 now I didn't forget about texture Replacements I'm just going to be covering those in a separate video and if you have a suggestion for which emulator I should be covering next put that in the comments below and if you'd like today's video slam me a like and if you want to keep up to date you know what to do and apart from that go play some games adios

Channel: Warped Polygon

Views: 20,681

Keywords: emulation, gaming, warpedpolygon, arcade

Id: 5l_96HeJAM8

Length: 24min 48sec (1488 seconds)

Published: Thu May 16 2024