Configuration Questions (Terminology)

[Sortajan]

I'm currently using SVN R 6497.

1. Under rendering, what does Des. Alpha Pass do, and what effect does it have on performance?

2. What does XFB do?

3. Under utility, what do the following do: Dump Textures, Dumb EFB Target, Dump Frames.

4. Under misc, what does OpenCL do?

[NaturalViolence]

1. Depending on your hardware and what game it may improve performance by a lot or a little. However it may break certain effects in certain games. It literally does what it says, it skips the destination alpha pass.

2. Emulates the XFB (external frame buffer) which is set of memory addresses in the Wiis main memory designated by software to store a color buffer (RGB data) while it converts it to Yuv. It is needed for some wii games to work properly but for most games it isn't needed and causes problems.

3. Dump textures literally dumps the textures that the game is using into a folder in the /user directory of dolphin. Dumb efb target dumps efb copies and dump frames dumps rendered frames.

4. Uses a new texture decoder written in opencl (open compute language) that runs on the gpu instead of the old one which is written in C++ and runs on the cpu. By moving texture decoding onto the gpu it can reduce stuttering in some games. But games will take longer to boot since it needs to be compiled at runtime and some games may have texture problems with it. Also while the old texture decoder will run on any system that can run dolphin the new one has some extra requirements in order to work, you need to be running windows vista/7 (xp might be supported can't remember) and have a video card and drivers that support opencl.

[avindra]

(11-30-2010, 03:34 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: games will take longer to boot

Mind you, only a few seconds longer. It's totally worth the wait.