Thought I might share my brief experience with Dolphin on my 13" M1 MBP so far. I've been eager to test this since I've read the article on it.
I've used the 5.0-15476 Dev Build and tried Mario Sunshine (PAL) and Rogue Squadron II (US) using the internal WQXGA Display.
- DSP LLE doesn't seem to work at all. At least I couldn't get both games to even start, screen just goes black. So having a boot screen is not an option as it doesn't go well with HLE.
- Mario runs great, at full speed (but of course it's just the 25fps EU version). I've played through a couple of levels and the only issue with graphics I had was the "M"-shaped portals that Mario enters from Delfino Plaza. They have a rectangular black box around them. Doesn't seem to be an issue with the back end (so far Vulkan is the only option on Mac). I've compared with my Windows machine running the same build and the black boxes aren't there using Vulkan back end.
- Any kind of Anti Aliasing seriously kills performance. It's funny, Mario runs at full speed at 4x resolution with or without UHD textures, but runs like crap at native with only the slightest amount of msaa. A bit of a bummer because 4x ssaa makes it look even better on my pc.
- 16x Anisotropic filtering had no noticable impact on the performance with the M1.
- Star Wars was disappointing. In the article it said it runs "admirably", but I couldn't get it into a playable state. Hybrid Ubershaders, Compile Before Start had to be enabled for the game to even start. That being said I find Rogue II doesn't seem to run well at all, at least in the current state of the emulator. Even on my PC with GTX1060/6GB and D3D back end the frame rate goes down during cockpit transistions, fade-to-blacks and cut scenes, causing ugly sound. The regular game play is good at 60 fps on both the M1 and PC. But the frame drops are far worse and render the game unplayable on the M1, while it's more of a nuisance on the PC. That might be due to HLE though. It does this on any setting, it's not even worse without any improved graphics. The frame drops are always there. But yeah, I see all those videos of RL2 running nicely on yt and it makes me wonder what build and settings they are using and the hardware they're running Dolphin on. I was so naive as to believe even a Raspi 4 could emulate the entire GC library. ETA prime is such a liar.
- Another issue I had is that I can't get my Xbox One controller to rumble in Dolphin as there's only SDL drivers as an option. I'd so wish I could get it to rumble. It does with Steam, so it could be done, even if Apple doesn't support it...
Anyway, it's impressive to see what can be done supporting a new platform in such a short period of time, with all of Apple's restrictions. I see a lot of future M1 owners coming to Dolphin with the new models being out -- the work on this software will be greatly appreciated and I feel like we're only seeing the beginning of great things.
I've used the 5.0-15476 Dev Build and tried Mario Sunshine (PAL) and Rogue Squadron II (US) using the internal WQXGA Display.
- DSP LLE doesn't seem to work at all. At least I couldn't get both games to even start, screen just goes black. So having a boot screen is not an option as it doesn't go well with HLE.
- Mario runs great, at full speed (but of course it's just the 25fps EU version). I've played through a couple of levels and the only issue with graphics I had was the "M"-shaped portals that Mario enters from Delfino Plaza. They have a rectangular black box around them. Doesn't seem to be an issue with the back end (so far Vulkan is the only option on Mac). I've compared with my Windows machine running the same build and the black boxes aren't there using Vulkan back end.
- Any kind of Anti Aliasing seriously kills performance. It's funny, Mario runs at full speed at 4x resolution with or without UHD textures, but runs like crap at native with only the slightest amount of msaa. A bit of a bummer because 4x ssaa makes it look even better on my pc.
- 16x Anisotropic filtering had no noticable impact on the performance with the M1.
- Star Wars was disappointing. In the article it said it runs "admirably", but I couldn't get it into a playable state. Hybrid Ubershaders, Compile Before Start had to be enabled for the game to even start. That being said I find Rogue II doesn't seem to run well at all, at least in the current state of the emulator. Even on my PC with GTX1060/6GB and D3D back end the frame rate goes down during cockpit transistions, fade-to-blacks and cut scenes, causing ugly sound. The regular game play is good at 60 fps on both the M1 and PC. But the frame drops are far worse and render the game unplayable on the M1, while it's more of a nuisance on the PC. That might be due to HLE though. It does this on any setting, it's not even worse without any improved graphics. The frame drops are always there. But yeah, I see all those videos of RL2 running nicely on yt and it makes me wonder what build and settings they are using and the hardware they're running Dolphin on. I was so naive as to believe even a Raspi 4 could emulate the entire GC library. ETA prime is such a liar.
- Another issue I had is that I can't get my Xbox One controller to rumble in Dolphin as there's only SDL drivers as an option. I'd so wish I could get it to rumble. It does with Steam, so it could be done, even if Apple doesn't support it...
Anyway, it's impressive to see what can be done supporting a new platform in such a short period of time, with all of Apple's restrictions. I see a lot of future M1 owners coming to Dolphin with the new models being out -- the work on this software will be greatly appreciated and I feel like we're only seeing the beginning of great things.