PCSX2 Documentation/Path 3 Masking / Geometry Syncing: Difference between revisions

[[File:personapath3.jpg]]

Path 3 masking is a method of synchronizing the order in which geometry data (polygons etc) and the textures that go on them are sent to the GS (Graphical Synthesizer). It was a pretty efficient method of transferring information, which took completely different path routes to make optimal use of the PS2 Memory BUS and used a stalling method to keep the texture and geometry lists in order instead of interrupts which took extra cpu time.  This way, developers could queue up massive amounts of textures and stream them to the GS in time with the geometry data efficiently.

As you can see, the mask stops PATH3 from transferring while the VU is busy, then lets it go and almost immediately puts the mask back on, this ensures that at the end of the texture transfer, PATH3 stops again!

Truthfully? we never had proper control over these packets.  The GIF packets can come through the PATH3 DMA channel lumped together, where in actual fact, we should have been stalling half way through it, but in the emulator, we didn't really care what these packets were, so we just threw it all at the GS and ignored any packet ends and this is what caused the Texture/Geometry lists to go out of sync, this is where the crap on the screen came from.  As the emulator evolved it became progressively easier to fix this issue, although we had the theory down, developers would handle it in different ways with different timings for the masks, so it took a fair amount of testing and tweaking to get right.