Rewrite VU allocation, VU0 and COP2 synchronization.

These three changes are the main contributor to performance improvement this month. A significant portion of the VU recompilers was rewritten to make better use of the large vector file on ARM processors, reducing the amount of data which had to be stored and reloaded from memory.

Above: Performance improvement in a range of games on a Poco F3 (SD870).

The performance improvements will vary from game to game, some only saw 5%, others can be up to 15%, but it also depends on your U. We benchmarked both a Snapdragon 845 and 870 to illustrate the improvement:

Above: Comparing performance improvement for SD845 (AYN Odin) vs SD870.

Based on this data, it seems that the greatest improvement will be in more powerful devices. However, weaker devices such as the SD845 will still see performance improvements from these changes.

Default MTVU to on for all devices with more than three cores.

Previously, MTVU (multi-threaded VU1) was only enabled by default on devices with more than two big cores. We have relaxed that restriction now to include devices with more than two cores (basically everything). Generally, enabling MTVU on devices such as the Snapdragon 700 series can improve performance, but it will still be behind a device with 4 big cores.

Some games may be slower with MTVU on, especially if they have very high GS thread usage. In these cases, you’ll want to disable MTVU, preferably via the per-game settings (i icon when ingame).

Fix sky in Black.

A popular title, previously in the hardware renderers, the sky would not be visible unless you loaded the game with the software renderer first, then switched. This switch is no longer required, and you can run the game as usual.

Above: The sky in Black is no longer black.