Feature Request Thread

[RealReloadCoded]

The ability to force-disable interlacing would be nice, especially for the Star Wars Rogue Squadron games where every other scene is always interlaced, causing Dolphin's aspect ratio option to not have any effect, even if Progressive Scan is enabled.

A skipdraw would also be nice. Not for shader compilation, just skipdraw. Like PCSX2's skipdraw. The Software renderer kind of already has this with its Drawn Object Range setting, but I'm looking for something more like it works in PCSX2.

Further work on Software rendering would be helpful. The fact that it runs at less than 1 FPS on an Intel Core i9-10900K is just silly. Additionally, porting some of the options exclusive to the Software renderer to the hardware renderers would help, such as Dump Objects and Drawn Object Range.

[mbc07]

(10-06-2020, 12:17 PM)RealReloadCoded Wrote: Further work on Software rendering would be helpful. The fact that it runs at less than 1 FPS on an Intel Core i9-10900K is just silly.

Software renderer was never intended for regular usage, it was made for debugging purposes. Unless you really know what you're doing you shouldn't be using it.

[trey.merkley]

Is there any way we could get disc image caching? Between RVZ archiving and sizeable amounts of RAM, I feel safe in downloading around 3.7Gb to memory when I start up Skyward Sword, let alone a few megabytes for Animal Crossing.

[RealReloadCoded]

I know Software isn't for general use, but name one other emulator with a software renderer that runs this slow.

[mbc07]

(10-07-2020, 04:15 AM)RealReloadCoded Wrote: I know Software isn't for general use, but name one other emulator with a software renderer that runs this slow.

If you know Dolphin's software renderer isn't for general usage (unlikely the software renderer of most other emulators), why are you complaining it's slow? That's another sign you're trying to use it for something it wasn't designed for, honestly. As a debugging tool, it fulfills its purpose very well, especially when used together with FifoPlayer and other debugging features baked into Dolphin. If you don't need any of that, software renderer is not for you and there's plenty of hardware renderer options you can pick instead...

[AnyOldName3]

A key difference between Dolphin and other emulators is that it's genuinely possible to do everything the Wii's GPU can do on a PC GPU, and harder to do the same thing on a CPU at a playable framerate. If an optimisation makes the software renderer faster, but more complicated, that's a bad thing for Dolphin, as it makes it a worse debugging tool. With emulators for older consoles, their GPUs are slow enough that they can be emulated on a modern CPU without over-complicated code, so a software renderer can be usably fast and still a useful debugging tool. With other kinda-new-ish consoles like the PS2, the hardware was weird enough that it doesn't map well onto the modern CPU+GPU architecture, so it's a nightmare to get accurate emulation without a software renderer and making the software renderer fast at the expense of being a good debugging tool is worthwhile.

If you just want to play a game, you should be using one of the hardware rendering backends. Most of the time it'll give a result ranging between pixel-perfect emulation and close-enough-to-pixel-perfect-that-you-can't-tell-without-comparing-screenshots. If you're a developer trying to investigate a graphics bug in a game, you'll probably still want to use one of the hardware rendering backends most of the time. By the time the software renderer gets really helpful, you're probably stepping through the game's code a few instructions at a time, so it doesn't matter how long a frame takes to render as you might spend hours investigating a small part of just one.

[e2zippo]

(10-02-2020, 10:44 AM)iwubcode Wrote: I may be wrong but at least the Wii request should already be doable.  You can set the 'WiimoteSource' to emulated for the game that you want to play with an emulated remote.  Then you can add a section 'BluetoothPassthrough' with 'Enabled' set to true for a bluetooth passthrough game.

I have to look again, but I'm pretty sure I weren't able to do this before at least.

[vlad54rus]

Dolphin supports multi-threaded shader precompilation (ShaderPrecompilerThreads in GFX.ini) since introduction of UberShaders, why isn't it enabled by default or exposed in the GUI? Even on my weak FX-4170 it noticeably speeds up shader precompilation process. Please consider adding a GUI option so users can enable it if they want.

[Hasster]

Maybe you can add some kind of notification at the start of the game about which backend you using on android?

[vlbastos]

Head tracking/face tracking/eye tracking 3D "stereoscopy" (in fact just off-axis projection) for Android Dolphin would be awesome. No need to render each eye, no resolution loss, no color loss, just a rendering trick that delivers nice 3D to a single user. Even Parallax 3D using the cellphone's sensors would be nice. Demos:
https://youtu.be/xjH8Q4xsKpo
https://youtu.be/h9kPI7_vhAU