Removed DX9 and speed optimizations

[JMC47]

When it's finished, of course!

But, more seriously, it fixes about 20 issues on the issue tracker and 100s of other unreported/small issues. Try out the Tev_Fixes_New branch to see some of the massive fixes that wouldn't be (easily) possible with D3D9 around.

[isamu]

(01-09-2014, 06:22 AM)Xtreme2damax Wrote: How was hibernation? DX9 as well as XP support has been gone for at least a month or more, Dolphin only supports D3D10/D3D11 and OpenGL now. There were threads created on the forum where developers went over the benefits of dropping support for DX9 and XP as it was holding back development. Then there was an unofficial DX9-Final build released and for a little while now newer builds are OGL/D3D11 only with Windows XP no longer supported.

Well stick me in a tight dress and some pumps and call me Jane!!!!! I had NO idea d3d9 was removed. Wow. Guess I was in hibernation longer than I thought

I sold my steering wheel so haven't had a reason to use Dolphin for a while now(only played F-Zero GX).

[drhycodan]

Does the latest build from Tev_fixes_new fix the heat issue from WindWaker or is that only in master?

[degasus]

drhycodan: neobrain often rebase this branch, last time it was based on this zww heat effect fix, so yes.

[JMC47]

The test recording for the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=se8N65xyq6c used the Tev_Fixes_New build by mistake. So yeah, both have the fixed heat effect. Tev_Fixes_New also fixes a bunch of other problems too.

[NaturalViolence]

Wesker1988 Wrote:Thank you very much! So tev_fixes for accuracy were added
HLE audio code rewrite for accuracy.
and Vertex Streaming Hack, OpenGL GLSL shaders for graphics.

The last two have nothing to do with the removal of d3d9. Just thought I should point that out.

Wesker1988 Wrote:And there is no way to predict how much optimizations will help the performance until it's implemented,
or how much still need to be done, on the whole dolphin code at all?

I am not a dev but I believe I can safely say no as I don't see how that would be possible to answer.

[Wesker1988]

I see, just thought about the last part, that if you know how the Mips CPU works they maybe are able to see, what's still missing in the Code. Speedwise I didn't know if something like that would be predictable. We also have programming in C, C++ and Assembler in University, and sometimes our docent seem to know everything about the speed of my programs, when he looks at my code (Guess this is why he became a docentXD) - and predict, that I have to change some parts, or the program will become a snailXD. But of course it's just an "it become faster if", or a "it become slower if" than a "if you do it like that and that you get 3,456fps more speed.":-). Don't know how it is about the graphics, because I have never heard of a Graphic Chip like the one built in PS 2 before. But I have no idea about graphic chips at all :-).

So, thank you all for your answer's. It was really interesting to read what was implemented in Dolphin since then.

[neobrain]

(01-10-2014, 07:16 PM)Wesker1988 Wrote: I see, just thought about the last part, that if you know how the Mips CPU works they maybe are able to see, what's still missing in the Code.

There's nothing "missing in the code" which you could just add and all of a sudden Dolphin became 50% faster. People have to recognize things which are slow in the current code and come up with better solutions.

I can tell you for the graphics core that *lots* of things that we currently are doing are just plain dumb and it would yield a very noticeable speedup if someone actually started thinking about a proper design of the graphics core and implemented it. The problem with that is that it requires someone with knowledge of both the code base (and why it fails) and of the GC/Wii platform *and* someone who has the time and motivation to do this. A kickstarter would probably help a lot here, but that also would require to have a person with a clear plan and the ability to show off that he or she is able to succeed with that.
Please don't read this as "everyone but me is stupid and won't ever be able to do shit at all". I'm sure every now and then someone might come up with useful optimizations, but in the last few years of working on Dolphin I've mostly made bad experiences with such contributions, and either way such patches do not help resolving the fundamental design issues (they might in fact make them even worse).