Gradius V is a gorgeous looking game. The development team at Treasure outdid themselves revamping the style of the series into a modern looking experience. Past games in the series were more inclined to a darker “this is pitch black space” kind of style for most of the game, and this game is a little brighter and more colorful on that aspect. Either way, when playing the game on an emulator it can feel a little outdated if we don’t have the best graphic configuration settings, and the hardware to support that, so let’s get right into that.

This is going to be rather straightforward, because there’s not too much we can do in terms of settings, but if you don’t really know what you’re messing with when configuring an emulator, this guide might help you get a much better experience on the game than leaving everything on the default configuration.

This is how the game looks on PCSX2 1.4.0 with the default emulator configuration for the Video Plugin with the Direct3D11 (Hardware) renderer at a 640×447 resolution. It’s not like, horrible, but it could look a little sharper when blown up to full screen state:

Gradius V on the default graphic settings for PCSX2

First, this is the hardware configuration that this is being tested on. It’s somewhat high-end, because we want to achieve at least 60 fps easily:

CPU: Core i7-8700K @ 3.70 GHz

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080

RAM: 16 GB

Monitor resolution: 3440×1440

So, with that hardware, the best looking configuration that I’ve managed to get, is this one:

Gradius V on the best graphic settings for PCSX2

To achieve this, just go to the Config – Video (GS) – Plugin Settings… menu:

And choose these settings:

You basically only have to change the Internal resolution to 8x Native, and the Antisotropic Filtering to 16x, and that will make the textures to be a lot sharper, and the 3D models much better defined. Make sure you are rendering with your GPU to get the most frames per second possible.

So that’s it! If you have a better recommendation for configuration of this game, let us know in the comments, feedback is always welcome. Oh and remember… YOU NEED SOME PRACTICE!

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