Graphics API backend

[Streeter]

(01-03-2013, 04:28 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: I would hope that most users aren't dumb enough to just start randomly turning things on/off. Not to mention we have tooltips that warn against using them built into the application.

Well, your hopes are in vain, my friend. I see people turning on and off all sorts of options without a real understanding of its effects. I may be a good samaritan, Googling what I can, asking on forums the rest, but boy oh boy am I in the minority.

How much more taxing is per-pixel depth, and on which piece of hardware? It sounds like to me it should be default, but, whatevs.

Edit: Currently reading through that issue thread. Pretty interesting debate, I might add.

I think certain hacks for specialized scenarios which decrease accuracy, yet enable gameplay for one or two games, should be enabled on a per-game basis or somesort. But, hey, I'm sure you guys have already had plenty of discussion on the topic.

[Starscream]

If you have a strong enough PC, you basically don't have to worry about enabling any option. It's all relative. If you're running an i7-2600K at 4.2GHz, you don't have a lot to fear. On the other hand if you're me and you're running a low clocked AMD CPU, you'll probably want to use the settings that can still get the job done but not make the game unplayable. It all depends on the game and what kind of PC you have. Once you've been using Dolphin long enough you'll start to know which settings some games need and which options you can get away with not using at all. In the end it all comes down to if your PC is strong enough to use two main settings.

1) LLE audio vs. HLE audio: Use LLE and have the game sounds be almost as good as the console at the cost of needing a more powerful CPU, or use the HLE backend and have the game run faster but have inaccurate or missing sounds (although that's starting to not be the case with the current work delroth is doing with HLE).

2) EFB to Ram vs. EFB to Texture: That's basically the same story as the audio, only on the graphics end. Sometimes you can get away with using the less demanding option (EFB to Texture), other times you will need to use the accurate (EFB to Ram) option for the game to play properly.

Anyway, this is probably more information than you asked for, but I felt like typing it anyway.

[Streeter]

Oh, I know, I'm not about to worry about performance so much as accuracy. I wish there was a comprehensive guide that goes over every setting (bar the advanced tab) in Dolphin, covering the accuracy/performance/effects of each.

Anyway, I'm running the OpenGL backend with 3xIR, full AA/AF, per-pixel depth, OpenMP, and LLE on a dedicated thread. Basically, as high graphical fidelity as possible while maintaining the highest accuracy I can get away with.

Now, EFB copies to RAM would be more accurate with minimal speed impact on my end, correct? How about texture cache accuracy? Should I only be worrying about this if tex/norm/etc. maps start glitching out/flickering on me? Is it a good idea for me, with a high end system, to just crank it as high as possible and not worry about it?

Also, per-pixel lighting and texture filtering sound like nice enhancements...

[NaturalViolence]

Quote:How much more taxing is per-pixel depth, and on which piece of hardware?

GPU. And let me put it this way, you would have trouble even proving that it's slower via benchmarking, that's how little difference it makes.

Quote:Oh, I know, I'm not about to worry about performance so much as accuracy. I wish there was a comprehensive guide that goes over every setting (bar the advanced tab) in Dolphin, covering the accuracy/performance/effects of each.

I've thought about writing such a guide many times but there are a few things that have always stopped me:
1. Lack of motivation/time obviously due to the massive amount of work that would be involved
2. Dolphin has built in tooltips for the options
3. There are hundreds or thousands of forums posts about each one that can be easily acquired via the forums search function or google. And if for some strange reason they can't find one they can always ask like you're doing right now.
4. The last two times that I tried to do it the dolphin devs completely redid the GUI while I was working on it without warning. Oh man was I pissed off. Things have been pretty stable lately in terms of adding/removing/moving around options but that wasn't always the case and I'm always afraid that it will happen again. Delroth, billiard, neobrain, and others have their trigger finger on a few options that they want removed so it's not far fetched to assume that it will happen again.
5. There are "mini-guides" constantly being made on the site and forums.
6. Due to reason number 4 upkeep of the guide would be a mess. We had a very detailed guide once but it was completely outdated faster than you could blink and nobody bothered to update it.

We had another forum user who was in the process of making one via community feedback that was very nice but got himself banned while he was doing so he never had the opportunity to finish it..... This was many years ago though so it would be completely useless for modern dolphin though.

Quote:Now, EFB copies to RAM would be more accurate with minimal speed impact on my end, correct?

Depends on the game. The performance hit ranges from nothing to massive. I've seen 70% performance hits and 5% performance hits. It just depends on how the game uses its efb copies.

Quote:How about texture cache accuracy?

Depends on the setting and the game. On fast it has little to no effect on performance. On moderate is has little to moderate effect. On safe it has little to severe effect. We used to have a very fast option but it was removed since fast fixes most of the texture cache accuracy problems and typically has little to no impact on performance. There are a few games that might require moderate but 99% of games should be fine with fast.

Quote: Should I only be worrying about this if tex/norm/etc. maps start glitching out/flickering on me?

It will more likely take the form of "garbled" textures, but yes.

Quote:Is it a good idea for me, with a high end system, to just crank it as high as possible and not worry about it?

I wouldn't crank it all the way if I were you. But moderate might be a good idea, it's up to you. I leave it on fast myself.

Quote:Also, per-pixel lighting and texture filtering sound like nice enhancements...

To be honest you're unlikely to notice any difference with force bi/trilinear filtering and I know for a fact that it causes major texture issues in a few games.

As for per-pixel lighting the difference is minor and it may cause issues with some games.

Not to mention that these options constantly get broken for long periods of time without people noticing since almost nobody uses them.

[Streeter]

Well, this thread has answered most of the questions I had. Hopefully someone else will stumble across this thread and find it helpful.

I'll probably be sticking to 3.5 until I see a major fix/improvement in a branch merge. Just want to give a shout-out to the devs that this is the most awesome open-source project I've come across. I wish I were a more competent coder so I could contribute. =P