Arquivos da etiqueta: performance

Dolphin Progress Report: August, September, and October 2023

This past October, Dolphin turned 20 years old since its initial release to the public as an experimental GameCube emulator. It's been a long ride, with twists and turns. I don't know if anyone back in 2003 expected Dolphin not only to still be under active development 20 years later, but to also support the GameCube's successor in the Wii.

You might be wondering, where is all the pageantry? The honest truth is that things aren't ready yet. We have a few massive changes on the horizon that we wanted to be ready for the 20th anniversary, but that date was not an excuse to release something in a broken and incomplete state. For now, development will continue as normal, but we promise that there is some excitement to be had on the horizon.

In the meantime, we have some great changes for you this in Dolphin Progress Report!

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Dolphin Progress Report: December 2022 and January 2023

We've got a lot of exciting news and features packed into this Progress Report. On top of the normal emulator development, Dolphin's infrastructure has seen a massive overhaul. While most of the work has gone into optimizing our backend and hardware to meet new demands, users may notice some upgrades to user facing features like the Dolphin Wiki and FifoCI.

Some focus on the infrastructure doesn't mean there was a slowdown in progress for the actual emulator, though! A bevy of new contributors to the project mixed with the efforts of stalwarts has brought together some massive new features no one will want to miss. Headlining this Progress Report is a massive new performance hack called VBI Skip. If you're on a weak device that can't consistently play a game full-speed, VBI Skip is a powerful tool that can help make the game more playable and keep audio crisp and clear. If you're looking for higher performance overall, a ton of Vulkan optimizations and general emulator optimizations have given Dolphin a pretty large performance increase. A new option called Cull Vertices on the CPU can also greatly improve the framerate in many games.

If you're instead looking to enjoy some unique games, the Skylanders games can now be played without needing a physical Portal of Power connected. You can even use your own figurine data to continue where you left off with powerful Skylanders!

We have a lot to get through... but first.


It's that time again - we have to warn users of a rather annoying problem that can decimate Dolphin's performance, particularly in mobile devices. The culprit this time is NVIDIA based Optimus laptops - users have been reporting that the discrete NVIDIA graphics card has been giving them a fraction of the performance of Intel's onboard graphics!

We're unsure of what is wrong and haven't been able to determine exactly when it started happening. However, if you find that Dolphin is suddenly running slower than before, you can work-around the issue! Simply add Dolphin to the 3D Settings in the Nvidia Control Panel and set our Power Management setting to "Prefer Maximum Performance." That has been the only way to consistently fix performance.

A global Maximum Performance Profile does not work, you can only work around the issue by creating a profile specifically for Dolphin Emulator and setting it to Maximum Performance.

We also have one more announcement to make. For Android users who want the latest development builds on their phone without wanting to wait, we now have an Open Testing Program on the Play Store app.



Selecting this option will keep your Dolphin up to date with the latest development builds. This means you'll have access to the latest optimizations and features immediately, without having to wait for the next beta update. However, as with our development builds on desktop, there is always the risk of bugs and/or regressions slipping in and going unnoticed for a bit. If you want to live on the bleeding edge, Dolphin's Open Testing Program is here.

Now with all of that out of the way, let's finally get on with December and January's Notable Changes.

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Dolphin Progress Report: September, October, and November 2022

As we hit the holiday season, our Progress Report might be considered a bit late. A two month report became a three month report as we realized just how much work we had to catch up on. While the usual summer burst of activity didn't come, it seems instead everyone poured their time in throughout the autumn months! There's so many features, performance improvements, quality of life updates, and more that had to be considered.

We're going to have to skip out on some of the smaller updates this time around because there are so many big hitters. For instance, if you hate shader stuttering, Dolphin's Ubershaders have gotten a new tool that helps smooth out issues on Vulkan, D3D12, and Metal thanks to Dynamic Vertex Loaders that help reduce/remove pipeline compiles during gameplay.

If you're on a weaker device that stays away from Ubershaders... maybe after these optimizations you might finally be able to make the leap. Raw performance in Dolphin is up across the board thanks to many optimizations to the GPU emulation thread (which is emulated on CPU). Because this optimization affects the very core of Dolphin, pretty much every game should be faster, with a few select games seeing improvements of roughly 50%!

If you're looking to play with friends, we have some good news on that front as well. Dolphin's "experimental" Wii Remote Netplay support has finally received some much needed attention that may help it break free of that experimental moniker in the coming months.

And, for our Android users, a lot of the performance improvements also affect tablets and phones, but we also have a special treat only for you. The Android GUI has also seen a huge overhaul that should make it easier to use and easier on the eyes. And for those having problems with particular games using features Dolphin can't reasonably emulate, we have a few presents from an old friend to patch them up.

We could go on and on, but you know what time it is. Please enjoy these Notable Changes!

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Dolphin Progress Report: July and August 2022

The Summer tends to consistently be one of the busiest times for Dolphin's development. While sometimes the question is what do we put into the Progress Report, during the summer months it's usually how much can we fit into the Progress Report? This summer's congestion was then compounded by us blog staff having a few things we've been planning coming into fruition. Still, the show must go on, and we're here... albeit a bit delayed.

As such, we've got a huge smattering of changes to go over and many smaller ones that we couldn't quite fit in. macOS users in general will be able to rejoice with the addition of a brand new Metal backend brought to us by veteran developer TellowKrinkle. They also brought their graphics expertise to improve things for everyone, greatly reducing the remaining causes of shader based delays/stuttering when using Ubershaders. If you're looking for an easier way to setup a wide variety of controllers, a new SDL2 controller backend has been added for all OSes, and even brings native motion control support without the use of a DSU server to non-Linux operating systems. We also have a wide variety of emulation fixes, more graphics mods added, and the long awaited SD card "folder" feature!

All of that and it's our job to write about it. We've got our work cut out for us.

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Dolphin Progress Report: November and December 2021, January 2022

This year, we've hit an important milestone that's been in the works for nearly a decade. In late 2012, Sonicadvance1 began work on Dolphin's ARM JIT. Back then, there weren't any devices that had even a sliver of hope of running Dolphin close to full speed, but that wasn't really the goal. All he wanted to do was see if it could be done; it sounded like a fun, challenging project. However, as time passed the idea turned into more than just a passing curiosity. Users were more than happy to donate to cover the hardware cost of staying on the bleeding edge of a rapidly evolving ecosystem, allowing ARM development to flourish. By 2015, Sonicadvance1 astounded developers and the community alike with footage of Mario Kart: Double Dash!!'s time trial mode running close to full speed.

We've come a long way.

On that note, we're happy to announce that Dolphin's AArch64 JIT has finally reached feature parity with Dolphin's x86-64 JIT. This means that every PowerPC instruction that the x86-64 JIT supports along with every major JIT feature are now supported in the AArch64 JIT! And this is a great time for ARM in general, with each generation of processor pushing the boundaries and companies like Apple adopting the architecture for larger and higher power devices like their M1 Mac line. For those on mobile phones and tablets, Adreno powered devices provide decent enough graphics drivers to get a reasonable experience at this point. And with a critical bottleneck getting fixed just days ago, performance on Adreno GPUs has skyrocketed. You won't have to scroll far for that news, we promise.

But that's only the tip of the iceberg; we've had three months worth of changes pile up and some other important infrastructure news. We've improved the user experience on macOS significantly and restored support for older devices. In fact, enough has happened that we'll be detailing the status of Dolphin's macOS support near the end of the report.

And... we haven't even talked about any emulation fixes yet. The past three months have had tons of changes that would have normally been the highlight of a Progress Report. The three month gap between reports was not because of a lack of changes. Want to take Riivolution games on netplay? You can. Hate the EA VP6 bugs? Make them a thing of the past with a new option. Wish your favorite LogicOp game worked on GLES or MoltenVK? Odds are, it does now! The list goes on, but outlining everything would take way too long, so let's just dive in. Please enjoy the November, December, and January Progress Report!

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Dolphin Progress Report: September and October 2021

It's the beginning of the month and time for another Dolphin Progress Report! ...That line doesn't exactly work when it's midway through the month, huh? This Progress Report ended up being a very technically challenging report to write with several huge rabbit holes that go through the history of Dolphin and the games themselves. The first rabbit hole showcases TMEM, the GameCube and Wii's texture cache. Dolphin's approach to emulating this bit of the hardware has been to effectively ignore it exists. Trying to even begin to rectify the problems with this approach and explain the reasoning behind why it sort of wasn't emulated go very, very deep. This Progress Report also contains collaboration with the PCSX2 development team as they helped us understand some of the behaviors of Floating Point Math on the PlayStation 2. The fact that the PlayStation 2's floating point behaviors mattered to us for this Progress Report should tell you the kinds of things we were up against when writing up the changes.

If that wasn't enough, Dolphin also welcomed support for a wealth of mods through support for Riivolution. An easy to use GUI for launching Riivolution mods was added both to desktop Dolphin builds and Android. Speaking of Android, users may have noticed we pushed out an early beta last month. This beta was mostly to showcase and let users on the Play Store try out the newly finished Cheat GUI! We'll finally showcase that after a lengthy delay between when that extra beta was pushed and this Progress Report. While it's not related to Dolphin directly, Apple released the new M1 Max and we got our hands on one to see how it stacks up against the M1 with some rather interesting performance numbers at the end of the report.

With that out of the way, there's no point in delaying things any further. Please enjoy these rather lengthy Notable Changes!

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Dolphin Progress Report: August 2021

Many gaming communities over the years have reached out to thank emulator developers for their efforts. Emulators are an important part of many classic game communities and give players access to features like netplay multiplayer, modding, and savestates, while also opening up the doors to enhancements not possible on console. Sometimes it's simply more convenient to use an emulator that runs on your desktop, tablet, or phone rather than to dig out and hook up the original console every time you want to play one of your favorite games. However, it's important to state that our relationship with gaming communities is mutual, and without the help of players and fans, there's no way we could handle maintaining a library of thousands of games.

In this Progress Report, the gaming communities were the direct catalyst to many of the changes. They went on difficult debugging adventures, caught small issues that would be invisible to anyone who wasn't extremely familiar with the game, and even came up with patches to make games friendlier to emulator enhancements. All of these contributions, even if it's not code, are appreciated and help make Dolphin what it is today.

So, without further delay, let's get started with the August Progress Report! Enjoy.

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Dolphin MEGA Progress Report: April and May 2021

After finishing up the macOS M1 article the blog staff took a little break. Then they saw the date.

Oh shi-

Upon looking at the actual changelog, however, something became readily apparent: this wasn't going to be just a Progress Report; this was going to be a MEGA Progress Report. The long rumored time era of developers merging everything at once had finally come to pass. We have graphical fixes for Super Mario Galaxy and Luigi's Mansion, crash fixes for Star Wars: Rogue Squadron III, Xenoblade Chronicles, Ultimate Spider-Man, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (AArch64), and new features that make playing games more pleasant! And about AArch64, there are a litany of optimizations and fixes that will change things across most of the library.

And we could go on: Bounding Box, Interpreter, GBA to GCN connectivity, GPU Syncing, Mouse Locking, and still more! There's even a lengthy dev diary at the end for good measure explaining how the great mystery of Pokemon Box's was finally solved. The only way to do it justice is to do it right. So buckle up and get ready for the April and May MEGA Progress Report.

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Temptation of the Apple: Dolphin on macOS M1

From the announcement made on November 10th, 2020, users have had high hopes for the new Apple M1 devices. With its powerful Apple Silicon processor smashing benchmarks all over the place, users and developers were both asking if a native Dolphin build would be possible. Now we have the answer.

Apple's M1 hardware is incredibly powerful and excels at running Dolphin. This announcement has been in the works for some time, eagle eyed users may have noticed that earlier this month macOS builds were now being designated as "Intel". That's because …

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Dolphin Progress Report: December 2019 and January 2020

The Progress Report has come and with it some major changes and decisions. However, before we get into new things, we need to go over an ongoing change as we've seen some users struggling. In the last progress report, we updated our project solutions to Microsoft Visual Studio C++ 2019. We thought there would be no issues at the time, after all, Microsoft says that VS2019 runtimes are forward and back compatible with VS2015 and VS2017, however, it turns out that is not always the case, and we definitely encountered one of the incompatible scenarios. Over the past two months, we've seen many reports of users encountering "VCRUNTIME140_1.dll was not found" errors and not knowing what to do. So just as a reminder, if you encounter MSVC or VCRUNTIME errors, install the latest x64 Microsoft Visual Studio runtimes from Microsoft's website (direct link). Even on updated versions of Windows, you may be missing the latest runtime as these runtimes are not distributed through Windows update for whatever reason. We hope this clears up any problems users were having regarding these issues.

With that, we've got a lot to get through from the past two months. From unintentionally stumbling into an Achilles's Heel of the Zen CPU architecture and tanking performance to supporting a brand new environment with Windows on ARM support, we're going to run the gamut of big features, decisions, and fixes. So without further ado, let's get to it.

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