Development Thread Testers wanted - gx-optimization branch

[delroth]

Hi Dolphin users,

I've been working with degasus on a few backend agnostic (i.e. affects GL, DX9 and DX11) graphics emulation optimizations. The gx-optimization branch contains changes which avoid doing actions when a game sets a graphics register to the same value it contained before. Turns out this simple optimization divides by two the number of OpenGL calls per rendered frame in some games.

We'd be interested to get some more testing done on this code in order to merge it to master soon. We're looking mainly for three things:

• Rendering bugs caused by our new optimizations. Please check that the bugs you're noticing do not happen on the last Dolphin master revision to avoid making us lose time!
  
• Games on which the optimization improves performance. Be careful to use the same settings when comparing performance.
  
• Games on which the optimization reduces performance. I don't think this will happen but in case you notice something like this, please also check your settings.
  

Link to builds of the last gx-optimization branch commit: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/lrsiiujv0784lcb/YDfqQo0uPQ

Thanks for testing and thanks in advance for your feedback!

[Garteal]

I've tested this with 2 games at the moment: Twilight Princess and The Last Story.
The builds I've used are: 3.0-638 | main | and 3.0-643 | gx optimization |
There is no difference at all so far.
No bugs have been observed.

I have tried both the DirectX9 and OpenGL backend using various settings, which include:
- Setting EFB Copies to RAM
- Setting EFB Copies to Texture
- Setting the IR to Native
- Setting the IR to x4

Here is the results hosted on PasteBin. (Expires in a day)

[ExtremeDude2]

I'm going to guess you you had framelimit and stuff off

[RachelB]

I'm going to guess you you had framelimit and stuff off

I can confirm his results actually. I tested zelda TP yesterday and got the same thing. 30 fps in hyrule field, 10 without the ztp hack. On the title screen i got 120 fps on master, and 124 with gtx-optimizations. That's with 2 minute tests with each build/setting. Other than the title screen, which could easily be attributed to margin of error, they were almost exactly the same to within a small handful of frames.

[dEnigma]

Did some testing and benchmarking with Zelda WW and so far haven't noticed anything unusual, but sadly there also seems to be no increase in OpenGl performance (of two benchmarks one showed a little gain in speed, while the other showed a small decrease). I will test more games when I find the time.

Oh, I only tested the 64bit version so far.

edit: Oh, and I used my own builds, but I guess that shouldn't be a problem.

[KHRZ]

Many games are mostly bottlenecked by the CPU thread (this includes Zelda I think). Try something like Super Mario Galaxy. Also, you could try the games in single core mode, to see improvement in those that aren't affected in dual core mode.

[delroth]

Merged to master a few hours ago, thanks to everyone who tested the changes!

[RachelB]

Many games are mostly bottlenecked by the CPU thread (this includes Zelda I think). Try something like Super Mario Galaxy. Also, you could try the games in single core mode, to see improvement in those that aren't affected in dual core mode.

I don't ever use dual core, and i've still never seen any improvement with it.

[dEnigma]

I know this has already been merged into master but I just tested it with SSBB and despite introducing no graphical issues it gained me about 6 fps on the graphics-intensive map "Delfino Plaza", so yay for gx_optimization and yay for delroth.

[Starscream]

How can you be sure? Any number of of settings/programs running could account for this. See how many times you can reproduce this speedup and post some screen shots of before and after.