Dolphin on the pi 4?

[syferz]

(06-27-2019, 10:25 PM)MayImilae Wrote: It won't be 110 GFLOPS, it's faster in that bench because its better memory bandwidth reduces bottlenecks that hindered that benchmark. Even if it were 110GFLOPs... it would also be god awful. No one on this forum would call an HD2000 playable, by any means. I have a laptop with an HD4000, which is 332 GFLOPS, and it runs very few games at fullspeed even at 1x native. A third of that power just sounds miserable.

Also don't expect Vulkan to save the day. It's not coming any time soon, if at all.

So yea, Dolphin should run on the Pi 4. But I want to reiterate, it will run like ass. We're talking early days of Dolphin Android kind of terrible! Do not get your hopes up, do not be surprised when it's dreadful. We warned you! It is still fulfilling its mission as a prototyping and hobbyist device, and being able to run Dolphin helps that! Juuust don't expect to play games on it.

EDIT:


Could run? Years and years ago back before the OGL GLSL rewrite, sure. Playable? Very much no. Of course now, the HD2000 does not meet our minimum requirements.

Here is a Snapdragon 632, Adreno 506 (~115GFLOPs) playing dolphin games, yes there are some very bad performances here, but also some that are playable. The video is 3 months old, on a phone with passive cooling. I'm not trying to say everything will run great, but until we know what the Videocore 6 is, it should be assumed that it is more powerful than the ~70-80GFLOPs Videocore 5, and has room for at least a 20% overclock via Tomshardware RPi4 review.

The Raspberry Pi 4 has a faster CPU, more memory bandwidth and possibly more GPU power than the above phone, I just think it's premature to write off the RPi4 without actually seeing what it can do. The GPU is 2 generations newer, and the CPU is on par with Nvidia Shield TV's which plays dolphin emulation well enough for some.

[JosJuice]

(06-27-2019, 10:54 PM)syferz Wrote: Here is a Snapdragon 632, Adreno 506 (~115GFLOPs) playing dolphin games

That's Dolphin MMJ, not Dolphin. It has a bunch of extra hacks that, while they do increase the speed, also make games more unstable.

[MayImilae]

None of the games in that video are running at their proper framerate. They've been modified to allow them to run at the proper pacing while ignoring framerate. That is going to only work in specific minority of games that don't tie their game logic to the framerate, and can cause instability. Also even with that hack, most of the games in that video are running at 13-17fps, so um, that's slow.

[syferz]

(06-27-2019, 11:21 PM)MayImilae Wrote: None of the games in that video are running at their proper framerate. They've been modified to allow them to run at the proper pacing while ignoring framerate. That is going to only work in specific minority of games that don't tie their game logic to the framerate, and can cause instability. Also even with that hack, most of the games in that video are running at 13-17fps, so um, that's slow.

Mario Kart DD was running at ~45FPS, Strikers also looked much higher than 13-17fps and the youtuber commented that it was "playable" for him. I know the short cuts they are taking, but I don't know the bottlenecks they are hitting, the device only has 7GB/s of memory bandwidth, the RPi4 wouldn't have that problem, the CPU in the RPi4 is also faster, and who knows where the GPU finally ends up being. What we don't know, we don't know. I will agree hardheartedly that it's unlikely that RPi4 will ever play games as good as something like Nvidia shield tv, but knowing the Raspberry Pi community, do you really think that level of performance would stop them?

[MayImilae]

MayImilae Wrote:So yea, Dolphin should run on the Pi 4. But I want to reiterate, it will run like ass.

[bomblord]

(06-28-2019, 12:15 AM)MayImilae Wrote:

Pretty decent show. The central plot point kind of wore out its welcome though.

[Helios]

If users are going to be stupid as all fuck I'll just lock this thread tbh. Nothing of value would be lost

[syferz]

So I found documentation on the Videocore 6.

This part is really interesting:

First the GPU supports ES 3.2 and Vulkan (though it sounds like Raspberry Pi foundation doesn't offer open drivers for that yet, there are closed drivers that exist.

Second was this quote "Videocore 6 is about 4 times faster than Videocore 4"

Third is that the Debian OS is moving to 64bit.

A full speed Videocore 4 has 32 ALUs clocked as high as 500MHz. A literal configuration with 4x the performance is Videocore 6 having 128 ALUs at the default 500MHz, giving it 128GFLOPs, ETA Prime (Youtuber with a RPi4) reported a 620MHz overclock, so we could be looking at ~159GFLOPs, which puts it's raw performance in line with Adreno GPUs like the Snapdragon 508 (163GFLOPs) We know that the Tegra Nano's 230GFLOPs Maxwell GPU can also run Dolphin at a reduced performance, but it's interesting that resolution doesn't change performance in ETA Prime's video with that SBC, likely because the CPU is much slower than the full Tegra X1 at 1.4GHz, and much slower than the Raspberry Pi 4's CPU, which ETA Prime was able to push (along with his GPU overclock) to 1.7GHz on the 16 to 20% faster A72 cores. Of course how much of the bottleneck there is the CPU is all speculation.

I'm going to drop this, it's worth noting that Raspberry Pi 4 even if it does have this level of GPU performance, likely won't run the more popular games at playable frame rates, but I explored this to the fullest that can be explored atm, in a month or two when the documentation opens up and people have been able to experiment with Dolphin, we might be able to see new performances. Sorry if any admin's patience was tested, I wasn't trying to blindly ignore what was being said, just trying to discover the level of performance that might be possible with Raspberry Pi 4.

[bomblord]

ETA Prime did a video and early performance is not looking good. Seemingly nothing he tested was able to use the GPU (4k video flat out broke, 1080p native video stuttered heavily, youtube 360p video in full screen stuttered heavily).

Most notably in regards to emulation is PS1 games were running at half-speed which is well... half the speed of the Pi3.

[MayImilae]

So it appears the post that image was taken from (on forums.redflagdeals.com, super credible) has been removed. Hmm.

Meanwhile, on Raspberry Pi's website...

Spoiler: (Show Spoiler)

So here's where the confusion is coming from: the hardware could theoretically support OpenGL ES 3.2. THEORETICALLY. But the video driver currently does not support OpenGL ES 3.2, because the video driver can't make compliance with 3.1, let alone 3.2. The one who made their driver stack has left Broadcom, so Broadcom is not going to put in the effort to change this. It's possible at some point in the future that someone outside broadcom will go through the effort to bring OpenGL ES 3.2 or Vulkan support to the driver, but it would have to be a random outsider, and there's no telling when or IF that will happen. Currently no one is working on it.

Do not purchase a Pi 4 with the expectation that this situation will change. Enjoy the Pi 4 for what it is, and be happy if it improves!

Also do not expect that Vulkan, if it does come, will magically make the Pi 4 run Dolphin games at full speed. That's not happening.