DuckStation Update Makes PlayStation Emulation Smoother Than Ever

DuckStation, one of the more popular Sony PlayStation 1 emulators, received a major update that significantly boosts performance and enhances the user experience. The developers of DuckStation have incorporated multi-threaded shader compilation, which should virtually eliminate shader compilation stutter on any modern PC, running Windows, MacOS, or Linux. Coverage from other outlets mistakenly mark this as a win for Android PS1 emulation efforts as well, but DuckStation dropped Android support in March.

In addition to multi-threaded shader compilation, DuckStation now also supports multi-threaded graphics pipeline compilation, the devs reworked its shader caching mechanism, and added CPU-bound dynamic task thread counts. In short, DuckStation should now be one of the most performant PlayStation 1 emulators for modern platforms that still maintains a high degree of accuracy. This broad, multi-threaded shader rework further improves DuckStation's performance lead over other PlayStation 1 emulators.

Compared to the other two most popular solutions, DuckStation is much more hardware-accurate than ePSXe and more performant than Mednafen/Beetle PSX. DuckStation could be seen as a middle ground, but really there's no reason to use Mednafen over DuckStation unless you're using a frontend like RetroArch. If your use case demands system accuracy to the degree that the difference between Mednafen and DuckStation would matter, you should likely be using real hardware instead anyway.

Besides superior hardware accuracy (which is important for things like speedrunning, where exact game behaviors are needed to duplicate runs,) DuckStation also supports a suite of modern features, including a Big Picture UI, widescreen rendering, automatic controller binding, and even PS1 texture warping correction. Like Mednafen/Beetle PSX, DuckStation allows users to remove the greatest visual defect present in PlayStation 1 games at will. Unlike Mednafen/Beetle PSX, however, you aren't forced to wrangle with a UI-less emulator or the RetroArch frontend in order to use that feature.

This update to DuckStation (spotted first by @BaldlyRudy on X/Twitter,) highlights how far PlayStation 1 emulation has come. To those worried that these modern, multi-threaded graphics features may go to waste on PlayStation 1 games, also keep in mind that emulators have broad support for custom shader injection, akin to something like ReShade.  Similar to Super ZSNES, DuckStation shows that these legacy titles can still be enhanced for modern enthusiasts.

Multi-threading shader compilation also greatly improves performance for custom shader injection, making full-speed, enhanced PlayStation emulation smooth on even modest multi-threaded CPUs. Custom shaders can vary from effects like cel-shading to CRT display emulation. Despite being a modification, CRT shaders can greatly enhance the presentation of the PlayStation's flagship 2D games, like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, for example.