Character Sprites and Game Squares missing from Mario Party 2 Board - Glide64

[d2produce]

So when I swap to Parallel all the sprites and game squares (or circles) show up again.  When I have it set to Glide64 for the 4k Resolution, all I can see is the background Image of say Western town, no characters, no dice block, no game squares (circles in Mario Partys case)  basically no sprites at all on the game board just the background.  I tried disabling every setting I've changed to get good graphics out of Glide64 but it seems to be Glide64 itself that's doing this as disabling all the non-basic settings still isn't allowing those images to render.  Does anyone know what am I can fix this glitch?

[d2produce]

So I sort of got it working at least playably, apparently it was my Resolution settings, even though I'm on a 4k TV with AMD Rx580 graphics card and AMD Ryzen 1800 CPU it somehow can't play N64 in 4K.  I don't know if my GPU isn't running with Retroarch or what.  Also there's a grid of Lines going through everything.  Anyone know how to check if Retroarch is running off the GPU or On-board graphics? or why Mario Party has Lines going through it? Any help is appreciated, thanks.

Edited April 1, 2021 by d2produce

[neil9000]

43 minutes ago, d2produce said:

So I sort of got it working at least playably, apparently it was my Resolution settings, even though I'm on a 4k TV with AMD Rx580 graphics card and AMD Ryzen 1800 CPU it somehow can't play N64 in 4K.  I don't know if my GPU isn't running with Retroarch or what.  Also there's a grid of Lines going through everything.  Anyone know how to check if Retroarch is running off the GPU or On-board graphics? or why Mario Party has Lines going through it? Any help is appreciated, thanks.

These are simply emulation issues. N64 is not a well emulated system, its decent in a lot of cases, but also has a lot of issues with specific games still, and this looks like one of those games. Upscaling these 3D systems is very GPU intensive, especially going up to 4K. Also the N64 cores use OpenGL as there graphics drivers, and AMD GPU's are notoriously bad in that respect.

Long story short, N64 emulation has issues, and 4K needs some major hoursepower (preferably on a GPU that does doesnt have poor openGL implementations).

Why is AMD driver's performance in OpenGL games so bad? : Amd (reddit.com)

Poor Opengl performance on Rx570 - AMD Community

Poor rx580 performance : Amd (reddit.com)

How bad is AMD's OpenGL performance compared to NVIDIA? : Amd (reddit.com)

Maybe the above links will provide you with some insight.

[Your Friendly A.I Overlord]

40 minutes ago, d2produce said:

I don't know if my GPU isn't running with Retroarch or what. 

I use the Mupen64_plus_next core with the Parralel RDP plugin and the Vulkan renderer. Rendering n64 (with Parralel) in a higher resolution can be very gpu intensive. I believe 4k is 8x scaling. My gtx 1070 can't do more than 4x. I am not sure about the lines. It could be scaling artifacts. As I don't have that game I don't know what the solution is. But you could try different RDP plugins with game overrides or different cores or even stand-alone emulators. I know PJ64 with the GlideN64 plugin is less taxing on the gpu and may not exhibit the same scaling artifacts. 

[Your Friendly A.I Overlord]

2 minutes ago, neil9000 said:

Also the N64 cores use OpenGL as there graphics drivers, and AMD GPU's are notoriously bad in that respect.

You could configure your core to use the Vulkan api. It is my understanding that AMD gpu's fare much better under Vulkan.

[neil9000]

Just now, Koroth said:

You could configure your core to use the Vulkan api. It is my understanding that AMD gpu's fare much better under Vulkan.

Yeah i think thats new, the mupen core was always previously opengl only, im on a RTX 2080 Super though, so i don't have the opengl issues, and although i am also on a 4K screen i have windows, as well as any upscaling set to 1440p 120hz, not 4K 60hz.

[Your Friendly A.I Overlord]

1 hour ago, d2produce said:

So when I swap to Parallel all the sprites and game squares (or circles) show up again.  When I have it set to Glide64 for the 4k Resolution, all I can see is the background Image of say Western town, no characters, no dice block, no game squares (circles in Mario Partys case)  basically no sprites at all on the game board just the background.

I want to add one little thing. I sometimes see lines (scaling artifacts) with PSX hardware emulation. Those lines don't show with software emulation because software emulation is usually more accurate than hardware emulation. I didn't look into this but maybe there are cores or settings for n64 software emulation?