Questions about OpenMP and OpenCL

[Carbonights]

1. Is OpenCL ever going to increase performance, or at the very least ease the workload of the CPU?

2. Does OpenCL have any effect if OpenMP is on?

3. How significant of an improvement is OpenMP for a 4.0 GHz Quad Core CPU?

[Shonumi]

1. From what I can tell, it's not going to give you great performance boosts, or anything noticeable at least. It's just used for texture decoding, which probably isn't the most challenging thing Dolphin has to emulate. As neobrain said before in this thread, the API's design causes it to run slower than the SSE optimized texture decoder.

2. I don't know about this, never tried having both on at the same time. But I've heard it's a bad idea to run both at the same time.

3. The improvement probably wouldn't prove to be "significant" at all. Again, going off of what neobrain said, most games play at the same speed, some get speed boosts, probably ones with lots of textures I'd assume. My advice is to try it. Enabling OpenMP won't hurt.

[neobrain]

2. It's not particularly bad, it's just stupid because having both enabled at the same time shows that you don't really have any idea what you're doing and should RTFM.

Fwiw, texture decoding is more challenging than one might think, it was one of the major cause of stuttering some months ago after all.
Now that we have more SSE optimizations in place the situation is less critical though.

[Carbonights]

Thanks for the input.

I'll go read that manual.