Official Wii/GCN Emulator Analysis by DIGITAL FOUNDRY

[HectorMusso]

Hi, yesterday the DIGITAL FOUNDRY guys did this analysis of the official Wii emulator for NVIDIA SHIELD (ANDROID) (TEGRA X1) and you can even see it in the video as compared to the DOLPHIN emulator, it would be great to see a day running this game with this quality in Dolphin in SHIELD TV since it has been shown that if it can be emulated perfectly in TEGRA X1 and 1080p 60fps

See the analysis here -----------> https://youtu.be/JMQWcl_99fs

[Nintonito]

Obv it would be nice but an emulator that only emulates 3 games isn’t exactly comprehensive. A lot of expensive hardware emulation can be skipped.

[Guilherme]

It's an official emulator and made especifically to this game and to run in this hardware, I don't think Dolphin can achive the same level of performance once it's made to run all (or almost) games and in any (or almost) harware without official support. It's already impressive what Dolphin's devs have done so far. Anyway, if someone manage to get access to the official emulator files, this could help Dolphin a little, maybe.

[Helios]

Obv it would be nice but an emulator that only emulates 3 games isn’t exactly comprehensive. A lot of expensive hardware emulation can be skipped.

SMG is a pretty good test case though. That is not an easy to emulate game.

I mean, yeah OP sucked at properly wording it, but that's every Android user, and this one has a history of being particularly weird.

Anyways, it helps significantly when you have compiler and graphics developers paid to design an emulator that runs on one specific SoC. I'm not being flippant. Quite serious.

[mbc07]

Well, on top of OpenGL ES/Vulkan APIs, NVIDIA Shield TV also exposes the same OpenGL API available on PCs, which is pretty stable. That alone avoids most (if not all) issues caused by shitty mobile GPU drivers, which is the main bottleneck (tied with thermal throttling) on other Android devices right now...

[JonnyH]

Well, on top of OpenGL ES/Vulkan APIs, NVIDIA Shield TV also exposes the same OpenGL API available on PCs, which is pretty stable. That alone avoids most (if not all) issues caused by shitty mobile GPU drivers, which is the main bottleneck (tied with thermal throttling) on other Android devices right now...

I would argue it's not really the API (in fact, 'full fat' OpenGL has more weird stuff and spec corners that make it more difficult to write bug-free drivers).

It's more by leveraging the same core GPU architecture, NVidia effectively build on the shoulders of a well tested codebase handled by a team likely over 100x the size of the equivalent mobile GPU driver teams.

[Whatnoww]

I wish someone could look into making a magisk module that could universally patch in a better driver lol. I'll probably try to do that when I have the knowledge.

[Helios]

It doesn't work like that.

[JonnyH]

I wish someone could look into making a magisk module that could universally patch in a better driver lol. I'll probably try to do that when I have the knowledge.

If you have the knowledge to make a "better" driver, you probably already work for the vendor in question.

Drivers are slow and buggy (in some use cases) because they're *hard*. All the vendors have lots of good engineers working on it, with all the documentation and internal resources provided, and the end result is clearly imperfect. There's always trade offs on what they focus on, and even with infinite resources it can never be perfect for every use case.

It's not like there's a "constexpr bool make_dolphin_slow = true;" in the drivers or anything you can change...

[mstreurman]

If you have the knowledge to make a "better" driver, you probably already work for the vendor in question.

Drivers are slow and buggy (in some use cases) because they're *hard*. All the vendors have lots of good engineers working on it, with all the documentation and internal resources provided, and the end result is clearly imperfect. There's always trade offs on what they focus on, and even with infinite resources it can never be perfect for every use case.

It's not like there's a "constexpr bool make_dolphin_slow = true;" in the drivers or anything you can change...

There isn't?! And there I was thinking all this time it would be that easy and you Dolphin guys were just lazy or missing it while it was staring you in the face.