Is AA and AF done by the CPU in Dolphin?

[chaosblade02]

Do increasing these features raise the CPU workload in dolphin? When I turn AA and AF up, I get a HUGE FPS cut, even though its not even close to maxing out my GPU. My GPU is an R9 290. I was expecting to be able to max out AA and AF with an R9 290.

[Link_to_the_past]

(10-15-2014, 03:54 AM)chaosblade02 Wrote: Do increasing these features raise the CPU workload in dolphin? When I turn AA and AF up, I get a HUGE FPS cut, even though its not even close to maxing out my GPU. My GPU is an R9 290. I was expecting to be able to max out AA and AF with an R9 290.

Every graphic enhancement is done by the gpu so either your gpu runs in low power mode when running dolphin or those are it's limits. Don't underestimate dolphin, even with your gpu i don't think there are many pc games that you can increase the resolution and antialiasing to crazy levels and have no fps drop compared to 640x480.

[chaosblade02]

(10-15-2014, 04:07 AM)Link_to_the_past Wrote:

(10-15-2014, 03:54 AM)chaosblade02 Wrote: Do increasing these features raise the CPU workload in dolphin? When I turn AA and AF up, I get a HUGE FPS cut, even though its not even close to maxing out my GPU. My GPU is an R9 290. I was expecting to be able to max out AA and AF with an R9 290.

Every graphic enhancement is done by the gpu so either your gpu runs in low power mode when running dolphin or those are it's limits. Don't underestimate dolphin, even with your gpu i don't think there are many pc games that you can increase the resolution and antialiasing to crazy levels and have no fps drop compared to 640x480.

I'm fine for 1080p x8 AA x16 AF for pretty much any PC game right now with an R9 290. Even Crysis 3 is 60fps on high settings with few dips. My GPU also has a decent overclock on it. Its not even using 1/2 my GPU at any time according to MSI afterburner. There is no GPU bottleneck, so I was wondering why my FPS are tanking on what is typically an exclusively GPU related task when its not even using 50% of my GPU at its most?

The resolution is set to desktop (auto) its 1080p.

[NaturalViolence]

If turning up AA results in a drop in framerate then you have a GPU bottleneck. Either your gpu is throttling or afterburner is not calculating the load correctly. Those are the only two possibilities. What clock rate readings are you getting from the GPU while playing dolphin? What graphics settings are you using with dolphin? AF should have no effect on performance at all for you.

[chaosblade02]

Core clock is running normal, voltage is normal, everything is normal. I've never seen MSI ever put up false load %s before, not saying its not possible, but there is probably something else going on here.

I maxed AA and AF, and it cut my FPS in Last story down from 30 to 15, and my GPU load only raised up slightly over 60%. If I disable AA and AF, I get double the FPS. I'm incredibly confused here. I technically shouldn't be getting FPS hits on a GPU related task unless its maxing out my GPU, which it isn't. The loads do increase when I increase the AA and AF in steps, but I'm getting drops regardless if its using all my GPU or not. This is why I asked if for some reason it was using CPU to do this as well, because my CPU is probably the weak link in Dolphin, its an I5 2500k.

The dolphin revision is 4.0-3638 got it a little while ago. 14.10 AMD catalyst drivers.

Just AF enabled at x16 gives me a slight FPS decrease in spots in Last Story. This is with no AA. x16 AF never typically gives me a performance hit in any other game, period. But there are spots I get dips 2-3fps lower with x16 AF enabled on Dolphin.

[Link_to_the_past]

Last Story uses efb to ram which is cpu - ram taxing, so that is normal in a sense. With efb to texture the video card ram is used, while with efb to ram access to main system ram which is a lot slower is used. You probably won't have such issues with games that work fine with efb to texture. Also the framerate cutting in half is the result of vsync, the frame drop might be lower with that disabled.

[chaosblade02]

Ok, so this is a CPU-ram bottleneck then. Thanks for the clarification.

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It appears to run fine in Xenoblade Chronicles, meaning I don't get the same dip when I turn AA and AF up.

[NaturalViolence]

@Link_to_the_past

I thought only the texture efb copies are stored/processed at a high resolution? Aren't the ram copies scaled to 1x automatically so that the emulated cpu can use the same memory addresses? I thought that was why certain effects that rely on ram copies are always low res regardless of IR. Perhaps the scaling is done cpu side which results in an increased need for vdram <-> dram bandwidth?

[chaosblade02]

Xenoblade Chronicles runs like 90fps with AA and AF maxed out when I turn the FPS limit off. So there is something wonky going on with Last Story.

This revision is about 10-15% faster than the previous revision I was using, so it looks like good progress is being made.

[Link_to_the_past]

(10-15-2014, 05:23 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: @Link_to_the_past

I thought only the texture efb copies are stored/processed at a high resolution? Aren't the ram copies scaled to 1x automatically so that the emulated cpu can use the same memory addresses? I thought that was why certain effects that rely on ram copies are always low res regardless of IR. Perhaps the scaling is done cpu side which results in an increased need for vdram <-> dram bandwidth?

NaturalViolence you should probably ask someone else those questions, i only know a few general stuff and no details about how efb to ram works. Only that the efb to ram implementation is hybrid in dolphin and not pure, which probably doesn't make ir irrelevant.