Fast Depth and Z Fighting

[cammelspit]

So, I haven't played XG3 or StarFox Adventures in a while. I just got me a brand new PC so I figured it was time to break out some Dolphin and go to town. There seems to be a problem with at least those two games.

In XG3, I always had to disable fast depth or there would be such Z fighting that the shield and weapon recharge lanes, green and purple refill zones, and the windows on the buildings would become almost invisible and flicker like mad. A similar issue was seen on shadows in SFA but disabling fast depth only greatly helped instead of eliminating it entirely. (Please excuse me if I am not using the correct term, I only know enough to get into trouble) 

The thing is, the option to turn this off is no longer available in the latest DEV builds. I tried to set this in the per game INI but I am not sure if either I have not done this correct or if the option to not use fast depth has fully been removed.

Since you guys are quickly approaching 5.0 I find this decision a tad suspect seeing as immediately I know of two games that need fast depth to be disabled to work properly and removing this seems somewhat of a step backwards, from my stupid user perspective only of course.

So my question really is, can I still disable fast depth in some way and if so how do I do this?

In case it matters. Skylake i5 6600k @ 4.6Ghz\W10Pro\Radeon R9 380 @ 1010Mhz\Dolphin 4.0-9061

[mbc07]

Fast Depth removal was postponed (I think) to post-5.0 because it didn't make the cut to be ready for 5.0 release. Current development builds have Fast Depth option again so you only need to get Dolphin 4.0-9077 or newer...

[cammelspit]

(03-06-2016, 03:54 PM)Jhonn Wrote: Fast Depth removal was postponed (I think) to post-5.0 because it didn't make the cut to be ready for 5.0 release. Current development builds have Fast Depth option again so you only need to get Dolphin 4.0-9077 or newer...

See, this is what I get for not updating in just a couple days.  Thank you very much for the heads up on that. I also wholeheartedly agree with that decision to keep it in for now. Seemed to me that it needed a bit more time in the over so to speak.

As always, thanks!

[Aleron Ives]

AFAIK the change was supposed to enable Fast Depth by default, since it's better than Slow Depth for most games, and thus the GUI toggle was removed (although a GameINI option remained to force Slow Depth on some games). The problem, for me anyway, was that the PR was trying to detect if your GPU could use Fast Depth and would fall back to Slow Depth if it thought you couldn't use Fast Depth. The criterion mentioned in the initial comment was that your driver needed to support GL_ARB_clip_control, and I guess mine doesn't, so I was being forced to use Slow Depth, even though Fast Depth works fine for me when the old system with the checkbox is present.

I'm not sure why GL_ARB_clip_control was apparently required for the new system but isn't required for the old one, unless Fast Depth changed somehow in the process of making it the default.

[JosJuice]

(03-06-2016, 07:35 PM)Aleron Ives Wrote: AFAIK the change was supposed to enable Fast Depth by default, since it's better than Slow Depth for most games, and thus the GUI toggle was removed (although a GameINI option remained to force Slow Depth on some games). The problem, for me anyway, was that the PR was trying to detect if your GPU could use Fast Depth and would fall back to Slow Depth if it thought you couldn't use Fast Depth. The criterion mentioned in the initial comment was that your driver needed to support GL_ARB_clip_control, and I guess mine doesn't, so I was being forced to use Slow Depth, even though Fast Depth works fine for me when the old system with the checkbox is present.

I'm not sure why GL_ARB_clip_control was apparently required for the new system but isn't required for the old one, unless Fast Depth changed somehow in the process of making it the default.

The implementation of fast depth didn't change in the process of removing the fast depth setting. If you're using OpenGL, GL_ARB_clip_control is required for making fast depth as accurate as it can be in Dolphin. It will work fine without it in many cases, but not in all of them.

[Aleron Ives]

Thanks for the information. I guess that explains my performance drop; the GL_ARB_clip_control requirement was added in that PR, which is why I can only use Fast Depth under the old system with the checkbox and no GL_ARB_clip_control requirement.