ParaLLEl RDP this year has singlehandedly caused a breakthrough in N64 emulation. For the first time, the very CPU-intensive accurate Angrylion renderer was lifted from CPU to GPU thanks to the powerful low-level graphics API Vulkan. This combined with a dynarec-powered RSP plugin has made low-level N64 emulation finally possible for the masses at great speeds on modest hardware configurations.

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ParaLLEl RDP Upscaling

It didn’t take long for the handheld emulators coming out of China to get powerful enough to finally play N64 games, which is impressive—N64 is a notoriously challenging console to emulate. BizHawk For Windows and Mac; BizHawk is a very stable emulator supporting NES, SNES GameBoy, Nintendo 64, Atari, Sega and much more. It was mainly built for TASVideos.org, and has a ton of tools for making Tool-Assisted speedruns included, although it's still a very good and popular emulator for normal gaming. This emulator is one of the high-ranking emulators on the Android Play Store, Super N64 Emulator is definitely one of the best for android users. Being an open-source emulator it supports a variety of N64 games such as n64, z64, v64, zip, car, etc. The emulator comes with the save option so that you can load the previously saved games.

It quickly became apparent after launching ParaLLEl RDP that users have grown accustomed to seeing upscaled N64 graphics over the past 20 years. So something rendering at native resolution, while obviously accurate, bit-exact and all, was seen as unpalatable to them. Many users indicated over the past few weeks that upscaling was desired.

Well, now it’s here. ParaLLEl RDP is the world’s first Low-Level RDP renderer capable of upscaling. The graphics output you get is unlike any HLE renderer you’ve ever seen before for the past twenty years, since unlike them, there is full VI emulation (including dithering, divot filtering, and basic edge anti-aliasing). You can upscale in integer steps of the base resolution. When you set resolution upscaling to 2x, you are multiplying the input resolution by 2x. So 256×224 would become 512×448, 4x would be 1024×896, and 8x would be 2048×1792.

Now, here comes the good stuff with LLE RDP emulation. As said before, unlike so many HLE renderers, ParaLLEl RDP fully emulates the RCP’s VI Interface. As part of this interface’s postprocessing routines, it automatically applies an approximation of 8x MSAA (Multi-Sampled Anti-Aliasing) to the image. This means that even though our internal resolution might be 1024×896, this will then be further smoothed out by this aggressive AA postprocessing step.

This results in even games that run at just 2x native resolution looking significantly better than the same resolution running on an HLE RDP renderer. Look for instance at this Mario 64 screenshot here with the game running at 2x internal upscale (512×448).

RDP upscaling is available right now on Windows, Linux, and Android. We make no guarantees as to what kind of performance you can expect across these platforms, this is all contingent on your GPU’s Vulkan drivers and its compute power.

Anyway, here is how you can get it.

In RetroArch, go to Online Updater.
(If you have paraLLEl N64 already installed) – Select ‘Update Installed Cores’. This will update all the cores that you already installed.
(If you don’t have paraLLEl N64 installed already) – go to ‘Core Updater’ (older versions of RA) or ‘Core Downloader’ (newer version of RA), and select ‘Nintendo – Nintendo 64 (paraLLEl N64)’.
Now start up a game with this core.
Go to the Quick Menu and go to ‘Options’. Scroll down the list until you reach ‘GFX Plugin’. Set this to ‘parallel’. Set ‘RSP plugin’ to ‘parallel’ as well.
For the changes to take effect, we now need to restart the core. You can either close the game or quit RetroArch and start the game up again.

In order to upscale, you need to first set the Upscaling factor. By default, it is set to 1x (native resolution). Setting it to 2x/4x/8x then restarting the core makes the upscaling take effect.

A few new core option features have been added. We’ll briefly explain what they do and how you can go about using them.

(ParaLLEl-RDP) Upscaling factor (Restart)

Available options: 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x

The upscaling factor for the internal resolution. 1x is default and is the native resolution. 2x, 4x, and 8x are all possible. NOTE: It bears noting that 8x requires at least 5GB/6GB VRAM on your GPU. System requirements are steep for 8x and we generally don’t recommend anything less than a 1080 Ti or better for this. Your mileage may vary, just be forewarned. 2x and 4x by comparison are much lighter. Even when upscaling, the rendering is still rendering at full accuracy, and it is still all software rendered on the GPU. 4x upscale means 16x times the work that 1x Angrylion would churn through.

(paraLLEl-RDP) Downsampling

Available options: Disabled, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8

Also known as SSAA, this works pretty similar to the SSAA downscaling feature in Beetle PSX HW’s Vulkan renderer. The idea is that you internally upscale at a higher resolution, then set this option from ‘Disabled’ to any of the other values. What happens from there is that this internal higher resolution image is then downscaled to either half its size, one quarter of its size, or one eight of its size. This gives you a very smoothed out anti-aliased picture that for all intents and purposes still outputs at 240p/240i. From there, you can apply some frontend shaders on top to create a very nice and compelling look that still looks better than native resolution but is also still very faithful to it.

So, if you would want 4x resolution upscaling with 4x SSAA, you’d set ‘Downsample’ to ‘1/2’. With 4x upscale, and 1/4 downsample, you get 240p output with 16x SSAA, which looks great with CRT shaders.

(paraLLEl-RDP) Use native texture LOD when upscaling

This option is disabled by default.

We have so far only found one game that absolutely required this to be turned on for gameplay purposes. If you don’t have this enabled, the Princess-to-Bowser painting transition in Mario 64 is not there and instead you just see Bowser in the portrait from a far distance. There might be further improvements later to attempt to automatically detect these cases.

Most N64 games didn’t use mipmapping, but the ones that do on average benefit from this setting being off – you get higher quality LOD textures instead of a lower-quality LOD texture eventually making way for a more detailed one as you look closer. However, turning this option on could also be desirable depending on whether you favor accurate looking graphics or a facsimile of how things used to look.

(paraLLEl-RDP) Use native resolution for TEX_RECT

This option is on by default.

2D elements such as sprites are usually rendered with TEX_RECT commands, and trying to upscale them inevitably leads to ugly “seams” in the picture. This option forces native resolution rendering for such sprites.

It’s important that people understand what the focus of this renderer is. There is no intent to have yet another enhancement-focused renderer here. This is the closest there has ever been to date of a full software rendered reimplementation of Angrylion on the GPU with additional niceties like upscaling. The renderer guarantees bit-exactness, what you see is what you would get on a real N64, no exceptions.

With a HLE renderer, the scene is rendered using either OpenGL or Vulkan rasterization rules. Here, neither is done – the exact rasterization steps of the RDP are followed instead, there are no API calls to GL to draw triangles here or there. So how is this done? Through compute shaders. It’s been established that you cannot correctly emulate the RDP’s rasterization rules by just simply mapping it to OpenGL. This is why previous attempts like z64gl fell flat after an initial promising start.

So the value proposition here for upscaling with ParaLLEl RDP is quite compelling – you get upscaling with the most accurate renderer this side of Angrylion. It runs well thanks to Vulkan, you can upscale all the way to 8x (which is an insane workload for a GPU done this way). And purists get the added satisfaction of seeing for the first time upscaled N64 graphics using the N64’s entire postprocessing pipeline finally in action courtesy of the VI Interface. You get nice dither filtering that sm

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