We have good news for PCSX2 fans — a brand-new update has just dropped for the popular PS2 emulator, bringing with it a bunch of great improvements, from "serious performance gains" to support for new input devices, UI improvements, and more.

As always, full details on what's been added can be found on the PCSX2 website, but we thought we'd put together an overview just to give a brief overview of what's been changed, to let you decide whether you want to dive back in.

First things first, the developers showed off a graphic highlighting some amazing improvements to performance for EA Black Box's Need For Speed: Carbon, with the game having benefitted from a huge leap forward from v2.0.2 of the emulator, as shown below:

This then leads into a list of various new features that have been added, the first of which is the announcement that the open source series of libraries and programs FFmpeg is now being bundled together with the Windows build of PCSX2.

"It's no longer necessary for you to download FFmpeg separately before you use the built-in Video Capture!

We've also hand-picked the most popular codecs. Previously, we included everything that FFmpeg offered, but this was too much wasted space on codecs that were rarely, if ever, used. The reduced set of codecs should still provide you with all the modern, efficient options you need without taking up much extra space."

Here's the full list:

• Bundle FFmpeg on Windows
• Implement EyeToy camera support on macOS
• Train Mascon, Master Controller and Olympus Storage Devices support
• FullscreenUI/ImGui: On-Screen Display Customisations
• Various visual improvements to Achievements menu
• Implement cover download support
• Add Icon Selection and Preview to the Shortcut Creator
• Revamp the status bar
• Add a bunch of Open XXX Folder actions to Game List entries
• Add -datapath launch argument

As for performance and graphic improvements, the developers provided another list for what's changed, starting with an explanation of why the PS2's Graphics Synthesiser is so hard to emulate, and the story of how the PCSX2 developer TJ developed a new system to more accurately render texture depth. Here's that list in full:

• Depth feedback loops and accurate AFAIL
• Support for HW AA1 lines/triangles
• Support for Rasterizer Order View (ROV)
• Default to Direct3D 12 on Nvidia/AMD and mark Direct3D 11 as Legacy
• Use Enhanced Barriers API
• Add SW (Shader-Based) Anisotropic Filtering
• Merge together adjacent tristrips in drawlist
• Fixes to CRTC merging
• Improve depth target lookup behaviour
• Fix some target detection and format issues
• Adjust depth copies when doing Texture Cache moves
• Don't end render passes on enhanced barriers
• Improve destination alpha testing handling
• Framebuffer switching optimizations
• Further improve framebuffer copies
• And much, much more

You can read the full update here. The latest version of the emulator is available under the stable releases tab for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.