Is Dolphin dropping DX12 in favor of Vulkan?

[Paul12]

DX12 was great.

[Kurausukun]

DX12 really wasn't that great, and both Vulkan and OpenGL can almost, if not completely, match its performance with the proper implementation. DX12 may have been useful in a few incredibly specific niche situations, but it was riddled with bugs, and nobody was going to fix them because the entire backend was written by one guy who has since disappeared. Not only that, it would have been a gigantic pain in the ass to keep it going forward, as it required a specific version of the Windows 10 SDK to be present, and this would have become even more painful once it was moved to VS 2017. And this isn't even mentioning the fact that it's only supported on one specific version of a single operating system which many people, including myself, do not wish to upgrade to. Needless to say, it was not going to stay, and it was a good move dropping it going forward. Please stop acting like the Dolphin team has made some terrible mistake. And again, though everyone says this every time, nothing is stopping you from implementing it yourself, fixing all of the bugs, and maintaining it yourself.

[GreenT]

DX12 performs better than OpenGL and Vulkan for many games, and no, they aren't "incredibly specific niche situations." 

We understand the reasons why DX12 was dropped -- they were well-articulated before your recap. But people are allowed to have differing opinions. For those with borderline hardware, DX12 might be the only backend that makes some games playable at full speed. Those people will have to stick with an older build until they can afford better hardware. Don't be surprised if others who don't frequent this forum pop up with questions and/or complaints about DX12's absence.

[JosJuice]

(06-04-2017, 10:26 AM)Kurausukun Wrote: Not only that, it would have been a gigantic pain in the ass to keep it going forward, as it required a specific version of the Windows 10 SDK to be present

We require a specific version of the Windows 10 SDK again nowadays, so that's not a reason to drop the D3D12 backend anymore.

[Kurausukun]

Heh, my bad then. That's kind of funny, though.

[Link_to_the_past]

Personally i didn't have many issues with Dx12 backend while vulcan had issues with many games, probably driver related at times.

[dephined]

(06-04-2017, 04:06 PM)GreenT Wrote: DX12 performs better than OpenGL and Vulkan for many games, and no, they aren't "incredibly specific niche situations." 

We understand the reasons why DX12 was dropped -- they were well-articulated before your recap. But people are allowed to have differing opinions. For those with borderline hardware, DX12 might be the only backend that makes some games playable at full speed. Those people will have to stick with an older build until they can afford better hardware. Don't be surprised if others who don't frequent this forum pop up with questions and/or complaints about DX12's absence.

I confirm that, on a CPU limited system OpenGL is way slower (especially in copy to RAM), while Vulkan is almost as fast, but it also has more glitches...

[Resus]

Don't know if I should create a new thread for this but since we are talking about this subject I'm interested to know how DirectX11 compare to OpenGL in the recent Dolphin builds. I started using the Ishiiruka's builds and Ishiiruka recommends DirectX11 as the graphic backend while the official Dolphin builds recommends OpenGL instead.

Is there a place where I can see some recent "statictics" between those 2 backends?

[Kurausukun]

The reason Ishiiruka recommends DX11 is because the "async shader" hack (don't wait for shaders to be compiled, just show nothing until they're ready) is only implemented in DX11. The actual difference between performance varies between setups, but generally the rule is that if you have an Nvidia card, OpenGL will pretty much always be faster.

[Resus]

(06-07-2017, 04:17 PM)Kurausukun Wrote: The reason Ishiiruka recommends DX11 is because the "async shader" hack (don't wait for shaders to be compiled, just show nothing until they're ready) is only implemented in DX11. The actual difference between performance varies between setups, but generally the rule is that if you have an Nvidia card, OpenGL will pretty much always be faster.

I see, when you hover the mouse pointer to the backend it says that OpenGL is the more accurate one (hence slower) and DX11 is between OpenGL and DX9, meaning that it's faster than OpenGL but slower than DX9 so that's kinda contradicting there (unless this doesn't apply to an Nvidia GPU as you pointed out).

It makes sense that Ishiiruka recommends DX11 for the purpose of "Async Shader" though.