Splinter Cell 1/Pandora Tomorrow: Flickering shadows

[TGP482]

Title

https://xemu.app/titles/5553000c/
https://xemu.app/titles/55530019/

Bug Description

Splinter Cell 1/Pandora Tomorrow had Z-ordering issues, which were fixed in version 0.8.30. However, this introduced a new issue where shadows flicker and show artefacts when moving the camera, in areas where shadows previously did not render (941) due to the Z-ordering bug. You can see this quickest in Splinter Cell 1 by using the unlock all levels profile (!LAMAUDITE!) and picking the level 0_0_3_ Training or 2_2_1_ Kalinatek.

Base.Profile.2025.03.08.-.22.43.15.01.mp4

Base.Profile.2025.03.10.-.22.01.20.03.mp4

Expected Behavior

The shadows should not flicker or show artefacts.

xemu Version

0.8.30

System Information

Windows 10
R7 7800x3D
RTX 5080
Nvidia 572.47 Driver

Additional Context

No response

[abaire]

Briefly looked at this in Renderdoc and it looks like the depth test is set to equal when rendering the shadows and is very close to but not equal. Maybe a precision issue related to the changes from #1937 ?

[lostromb]

Yeah I actually saw this exact same issue spring up since I've been testing Halo 2 this week.
In Halo's case, there is a depth prepass where it renders albedo + depth to an offscreen buffer (format depth24stencil8), then (some mechanism?) blits that depth buffer to a final composite buffer, then there's a second render pass of the same geometry with depth test of equal where it renders the final lighting. Apparently the blit causes a precision loss somewhere. If the game renders two passes to the same depth buffer, everything behaves as expected.

[AhmetBilgin]

Hi,
I have even worse flickering on Steam-Deck using xemu 0.8.45 with Splinter Cell. Changing from OpenGl to Vulkan seems to look a little bit better but still unplayable.
See the attached video:
https://youtu.be/QN29gZHvhPo?si=r3SCXAUsM7QoeUiP

I've installed xemu via the Steam Decks discover store. Is there a way to downgrade to a better working version (for Splinter Cell) of xemu?

[TGP482]

fixed as of 0.8.66