From day one, taiHEN/HENkaku homebrew on the PSVita and PSTV has been held back by one thing in particular. That thing is the ability to use 3D GPU acceleration in homebrew, while it is theoretically possible to do so with libGXM, the library is very difficult to code. You could do *some* 3D acceleration with LPP but that’s too limited for larger projects! Now, that may change since Rinnegatamante is working on a GPU accelerated OpenGL implementation for the PSVita!

What is VitaGL? What type of homebrew could we get with it?

As the name immediately gives off, VitaGL is a project that aims to bring accelerated OpenGL to HENKaku-enabled PSVita and PSTV devices. Quite obviously, this project requires a large amount of work but Rinnegatamante has already been able to get something such as:

Vertex array and color array support. These are important when it comes to displaying colour on OpenGL polygons.

A rotating cube demo that runs at a high frame rate. This means that his OpenGL implementation is actually getting somewhere!

VBO support was added and the implementation’s performance was improved.

The main types of homebrew that you can expect from Rinnegatamante’s VitaGL project are:

HW rendered ports of open-source games such as Quake 3

Updates for some PSVita homebrew ports such as vitaQuake. Rinnegatamante plans to port ProQuake’s glQuake renderer to vitaQuake for better performance and image quality.

Possibly emulators that require 3D acceleration namely an N64 emulator (something that lots of us have been waiting for)!

Conclusion

As always, don’t pester Rinnegatamante for an ETA or whatnot! All you can do now is follow Rinnegatamante’s progress by checking out his Twitter since he communicates through there for the most part. The code for VitaGL is open-source so you can check out what he’s done and maybe even give a hand if you’re experienced enough.

Hopefully, big things are coming for the PSVita scene since with 3D HW acceleration for homebrew, the possibilities of what could be ported to the PSVita are endless!

Rinnegatamante’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/Rinnegatamante/

Rinnegatamante’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Rinnegatamante

VitaGL GitHub: https://github.com/Rinnegatamante/vitaGL

Spinning cube demo: https://twitter.com/Rinnegatamante/status/948913126216491009