Quote:The way a console works is that it has really good hardware (i.e. graphics card, CPU, ect...) but very little RAM. So in order to run games, they are produced to run games almost solely in VRAM, which poses a problem when you try to create an emulator, where PCs have alot of RAM, but not-so-good graphic cards.
I disagree with every single part of that. First of all consoles don't have good hardware compared to a pc, especially the wii. Second games on consoles do not "run almost solely in vdram" they usually use up all of the main memory and stream data into the memory off the HDD/optical drive as the game is running, and they use the vdram the same way pc games do. And that last part doesn't make any sense. PCs don't have good graphics cards? Any half decent pc video card has several times the vdram bandwidth of the xbox360/PS3 and dozens of times the vdram bandwidth of a wii. The problem is simply that while the individual components of a pc are amazingly powerful compared to a console they have very little bandwidth with each other. In a console although the individual parts are inferior the bandwidth between components like cpu/gpu/memoryis much higher than in a pc. This is why cosntant framebuffer read/writes slow down emulators so much. On top of that the wii has 2MB of edram specifically for the framebuffer, which is specifically designed for constant read/write. The entire content of the edram can be flushed with a single clock cycle if I am not mistaken. This issue has nothing to do with consoles having better hardware or running games "almost solely from vdram". If you have any cross platform pc games installed take a look at some of the .cfg and .ini files in notepad and you will see what I'm talking about, they usually have a section in their for the consoles since they are to lazy to remove it which maps out how the memory is allocated to the game for various things.
Quote: And the amount of time and coding it'd take to do that would be like redesigning Dolphin from the ground up.
Not really. The efb emulation is just one of of many parts of dolphin (the amount of code isn't even that big compared to most other things). The amount of code needed to do this would be insignificant, the problem is just that the devs don't know how to do it.
Quote:There are just so many graphic cards on the market, that even new PC games often have compatibility issues that take patches and hotfixes to figure out.
Not really a problem. All video cards handle most of this stuff the same way (except intel igps of course). Todays video cards do the same things the same way using the same apis. If working vdram based efb emulation was introduced it would work on all video cards since the drivers are responsible for how the hardware handles it, not the application (I mis-phrased that but you know what I meant to say).
Quote:maybe efb to ram is the wii ram, which is emulated. efb to texture goes straight to the models I presume.
Well that is just speculation. We need someone to get in here who actually understands how dolphin handles the efb and have them explain it to us.
"Normally if given a choice between doing something and nothing, I’d choose to do nothing. But I would do something if it helps someone else do nothing. I’d work all night if it meant nothing got done."
-Ron Swanson
"I shall be a good politician, even if it kills me. Or if it kills anyone else for that matter. "
-Mark Antony
-Ron Swanson
"I shall be a good politician, even if it kills me. Or if it kills anyone else for that matter. "
-Mark Antony