Hacked Up: The Vertex Streaming Hack

[MayImilae]

New article on the Dolphin Blog: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2014/01/17/hacked-up-the-VSH/

Feel free to discuss the article on this thread.


Before anyone asks why the article was this late, it was going to be put up much closer to 4.0-615's release but it was delayed by investigation into the Fermi issues.

[drhycodan]

Not only Fermi, but I'm on a GK110 Kepler and I still can't get the buffer_storage extension to work, and yes I am using 332.21.

[MayImilae]

drhycodan: make an issue report on google code, and we'll try to find someone with a 780 or Titan to confirm this. As I recall, technically a Titan, and the 780 that is based on the Titan, are not Kepler. So there is the possibility nvidia did something stupid. But come on, surely they would have tested this on their flagship products...

https://code.google.com/p/dolphin-emu/issues/list

[Thareh]

Hey,

I have a GTX 780 ti and the driver 332.21 installed, is there any way I can tell if buffer_storage is enabled and is working in Dolphin?

[MayImilae]

The simplest way would be to compare the speed in a specific reproducible section of a game in a build with the vertex streaming hack and a build after the removal. I commonly use areas immediately after loading a gamesave for such tests, since they are always the same after you load them. Make sure the frame limiter is off so that it can go as fast as it possibly can, and setting and stuff are the same (duh).

Do not use savestates for this. And don't test it in Twilight Princess.

[NaturalViolence]

I didn't realize that ARB_buffer_storage support had been added to nvidia drivers.

@neobrain

Please do one on why the ZTP hack was removed next. That still makes no sense to me.

[neobrain]

The ZTP hack can be replaced by a patch as explained in http://code.google.com/p/dolphin-emu/issues/detail?id=2499#c31 .

[JMC47]

@NaturalViolence: It prevented some changes to the graphics plugins that speed up other games. There are cheatcodes being made that do the same thing (if not a little faster) as the hack.

[NaturalViolence]

JMC47 Wrote:It prevented some changes to the graphics plugins that speed up other games.

^This is a much better explanation than "deal with it".

[rokclimb15]

For informational purposes, it looks like the GTX 780 does not support OGL 4.4 according to Nvidia reference specs. The Ti edition does though.

http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-780/specifications
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-780-ti/specifications