PCSX2 Gets Massive Stable 2.0 Update With Vulkan Support, Automatic Fixes, Per-Game Settings, and More

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When it comes to emulators, PCSX2 is easily one of the most popular programs in existence. This PS2 emulator has been around for quite a long time and has been growing exponentially as it makes more and more PlayStation 2 games playable with little to no issues. It has been quite a long time since the emulator got a stable update, prioritizing smaller experimental ones. Recently, PCSX2 2.0 was released, and there are tons of amazing fixes and some amazing changes that are perfect for the Steam Deck.

This update includes hundreds of new additions, improvements, and fixes, but I want to start with the parts that will really be felt on Deck. First, we now have Vulkan as a graphical renderer, which is perfect for the Steam Deck since Vulkan is used on Linux. The team also provided an automatic renderer to automatically detect and implement which renderer works best for each GPU architecture. This means it should automatically detect and use Vulkan.

We also have a "Big Picture Mode," which allows you to use a controller in a new, simplified interface comfortably. This is perfect to use with the Steam Deck as it simplifies the UI into a comfortable controller-friendly way. While there are some graphical interfaces already that you can use like ES-DE, which is my favorite, but this is a nice alternative.

There are more improvements on top of this that will be really nice on Steam Deck, but they are great improvements overall. Other than the ones above, we have great improvements like:

• New Qt Interface for Better GUI and a new, sleek look
• Plugins have disappeared, but their code is now in PCSX2 directly, so no features were lost
• Games can now have automatic fixes applied to it so each game runs smoothly
• You can change settings for each game instead of changing your entire emulator's settings
• PCSXS2 can now auto-update translations thanks to Crowdin
• RetroAchievements has been integrated
• A new patching/cheating system called Pnach 2.0 format is now implemented for significantly better Qol improvements
• Fastmem or Fast Memory Access was introduced to increase memory speed with no side effects
• Blending performance has been improved, which allows for significant performance improvements, with some games seeing an almost 100 FPS increase.
• Native scaling was introduced so ghosting or misaligned bloom so it wont be nauseating to play games at higher resolutions
• FFMPEG video capture has been added so you can use modern file formats and encodings
• PCSX2 now supports texture replacements
• Sound has been improved for smoother and output levels have been lowered to match the PS2
• New input options along with automatic mapping
• CHD compression has arrived, along with ZSO compression being implemented

There are more, and some details I didn't list, but these are just some of the great improvements and additions that were added. The update is phenomenal, and I highly recommend checking out the full changelog to see what has changed with some more detail.

You can download PCSX2 via their website, Discover Store, or using something like EmuDeck or RetroDECK.

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