Game:

RetroArch (2022)

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There's a myth floating around that Retroarch is superior to the stock emu that Sony included and that there's no reason to use the built in emu. But I just found a reason, FMV videos look so much better on the stock Emu than retroarch. the main reason why the Retroarch is considered better is because the pcsx rearmed core is more updated which adds more compatibility for games. If the stock emu gets updated it’ll have the same fixes and it'll look much better and probably perform better too.

While testing my Taylor Swift PSX Video disc I noticed that there's a lot of visual banding going on when played on Retroarch whereas with the built in standalone emu it looks much better.

let me preface by saying I'm no expert on any of this stuff but after some research i discovered that the playstation has various modes when it comes to displaying color.

Mode 4: 4-bit CLUT (16 colors)
Mode 8: 8-bit CLUT (256 colors)
Mode 15: 15-bit direct (32,768 colors)
Mode 24: 24-bit (16,777,216 colors)

4bit and 8bit modes uses color palettes also known as CLUT (color lookup table), 4 bit uses 16 colors while 8bit uses 256 colors. mode 15 uses 32,768 colors while mode 24 uses 16,777,216 colors. the psx uses something called mdec for video, when decoding FMVs it uses the 24-bit mode. The problem with Retroarch is it forces the color mode at game load time and it's not able to switch. At default, the psx is set to 16bpp (15bpp to be exact) so in retroarch all FMVs are down-sampled from 24bit to 16bit, thus causing reduced colors and the banding effect.

On a real Playstation and on the standalone Pcsx Emulator, it's able to switch between modes, that's why it looks so much better on the stock EMU because it can switch color depth modes. When it comes to rendering polygons and textures, that has to be in 15 bit mode including FMVs such as for games like Fear Effect where it uses FMV video for the background.

There might be a way to force retroarch to load games into 32bpp, but then that means it'll cause a performance hit or something like that.

psx technical specifications crap if u wanna read it
https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps1/GPU
https://psx.arthus.net/sdk/Psy-Q/DOCS/TECHNOTE/mdecnote.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_technical_specifications

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