Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time (PPSA02433)

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Title

Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time (PPSA02433)

Content version tested

01.000.002

AnyPS5 commit

main ec7eacc62d (PR #8825), with local PRX modifications:

• libSceAudioOut: adjusted priming cushion in AudioOut2Context.cpp (queueDepth * 2) so contexts with 2-grain queues un-prime and play rather than staying permanently muted.
• libSceAvPlayer: relaxed the frame recycling loop in Source.cpp to clamp against timestamp drift rather than dropping video frames on small demuxer clock jitter.
• libSceVideodec / libSceVideodec2: stubs for unmapped exports used during startup.
• libSceAgcDriver: avoided assertion on storage image writes over memory outside write-watch tracking in Texture.cpp.

System tested

Windows 11 Pro 10.0.26100, MinGW GCC 15.2.0 (WinLibs posix-seh ucrt r7):

• System 1 (APU): AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS with AMD Radeon 780M (driver 32.0.11039.5001, subgroup size 64)
• System 2 (dGPU): NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 6GB Laptop GPU (driver 32.0.16.1742, subgroup size 32)

Furthest point

In game

What is shown

Unreal Engine 4 title (../../../Lava/Lava.uproject). Tested through the opening cinematics and into active 3D gameplay on N. Sanity Beach.

AMD Radeon 780M (RDNA 3 / Wave64):

• Reaches full gameplay at N. Sanity Beach with complete visuals: terrain, characters (Crash, Aku Aku), props, foliage, directional sunlight, cascaded shadows, water distortion and screen-space reflections.
• Steady 60.0 FPS presentation during gameplay (~16.6 ms frametimes) and locked 30.0 FPS during cutscenes.
• Continuous audio output via Wwise / libSceAudioOut2 across both active contexts; zero dropped frames logged over extended sessions (>37,000 pushes on context 2, >19,000 pushes on context 1).
• Holding Triangle (I key on keyboard) cleanly skips cinematics directly to the beach.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 (Ampere / Warp32):

• Converts and reaches the intro cutscenes and beach gameplay.
• Cutscene rendering (e.g. Dr. Neo Cortex in the temporal rift) shows lit 3D models and effects.
• In outdoor beach gameplay, all opaque deferred geometry (terrain, cliffs, vegetation, Crash in hammock) renders as solid black silhouettes against the forward-rendered sky and ocean.
• Runs at ~8.7 FPS (frametime ~114 ms), bound by host-imported memory transfer overhead on Windows over PCIe.

Current blocker

None on AMD RDNA hardware (playable in game at 60 FPS).

Blockers on NVIDIA / 32-wide subgroup hardware:

1. Wave64 in deferred shading: Fragment shaders running on 32-lane subgroups clamp cross-lane operations (SpirvAluEmitterMath.cpp), causing UE4's cascaded shadow projection and directional lighting evaluation to collapse to zero for opaque G-Buffer passes.
2. PCIe host-import latency: As noted in architecture documentation, host imports of guest memory on NVIDIA's Windows driver incur substantial read stalls during draw submission, capping throughput at single-digit FPS.

How it was run

1. Built from source with WinLibs GCC 15.2.0:

cmake --build build --config Release

2. Unwrapped eboot.bin and 40 bundled .prx files with tools/unwrap_self.py and relinked:

relinker --windows --registry --sce-module-path app0 --module-dir sce_module app0/eboot.bin app.exe

3. Set texture streaming pool in app0/ue4commandline.txt:

../../../Lava/Lava.uproject -r.Streaming.PoolSize=1024 -StreamingPoolSize=1024

4. Run environment:

set ANYPS5_GPU=AMD
set ANYPS5_PRESENT_MODE=mailbox
app.exe

AI-assisted: yes. Testing, log analysis and this report were prepared with AI assistance (Antigravity); the in-game results (FPS, picture, audio, controls) were observed by me.