Snapdragon 888 and 16 GB of ram

[Aggro_hamtaro]

Anyone thinking about getting a new device this year?
I know you might be thinking 16GB are overkill on a phone. But when it comes to emulation this is not the case.
Many texture packs, even downsized do not work well with the Prefatching enabled.

My current phone for example, has 8GB of ram and a Snapdragon 855. I was hoping that with this years devices performance will be sufficient to run even demanding games like Star Fox adventures with custom HD textures in full HD.

From what I could gather so far, the Emulation speed on the 888 is almost doubled compared to the Snapdragon 855.
What are your thoughts on the future of mobile emulation?

[LG Fanatic]

Yep. What 888 will give users is extra headroom to push higher resolutions and custom textures. In fact, one tech youtuber did a brief test with dolphin. The Xiaomi Mi11 was able push COD MW3 to 1080p while maintaining 30fps. It's amazing how far we've come in 7 years. I remember when we could barely play luigi's mansion. Now we can play Xenoblade Chronicles at fullspeed(device permitting)! Crazy.

[vlbastos]

Poco F2 Pro (Snapdragon 865) here. My thoughts:
1. As of Dolphin 5.0-13467 and Adreno drivers V@0502.0, you can get as fast as 33 fps-ish in Super Mario Sunshine using the 60fps and 21:9 widescreen Gecko codes, without any texture packs, turning on all enhancements and 2x screen resolution. So, to get to 60fps, I would need about 100% enhancement over my current setup. BUT, I really would love to play it at 3x resolution and with a texture pack. Running the same config above, in 3x resolution, gives about 21 fps-ish. I would need a 200% improvement over my setup. And the current performance impact of using a PNG texture pack is far great to be considered, not to mention the constant stuttering.
2. From what the specs say, S888 will have about 25% better CPU performance and 35% better GPU performance than S865. But Dolphin's performance is heavily CPU dependant, capping the GPU performance when CPU usage gets to 25% (I tried everything: Dolphin won't use more than 25% of all the S865 CPU power). So, if everything goes according to the papers, we could get 42 fps @ 2x resolution or 27 fps @ 3x resolution. Still far far away from the 60 fps target, not even including a texture pack.
3. Unless S888 has some secret "Dolphin booster" (optimized instruction sets, who knows), the emu would need a 43% performance boost on Android for 2x resolution (3x needing a staggering 123% improvement).
4. As for texture packs: Adreno and Mali don't support DXT texture compression, so we're stuck with PNG packs, which don't help the gaming performance. I opened a feature request, requesting support for ASTC texture compression, which is supported by Adreno and Mali, and would probably fix the performance impact of such texture packs. Let's hope the devs like this idea and implement it.
5. Adreno is a bitch for the devs. S888 still uses Adreno. I don't expect S888 to fix anything the devs hate in Adreno. Maybe we would be better served using a Mali chipset like the new Exynos (which, by the way, uses the same CPU setup as S888). Or wait until the much-hyped AMD GPUs come to mobile phones (again, on future Exynos chipsets).
6. In all, I don't see much improvement on S888 over S865, Dolphin-wise. I'd say go for the cheapest, or go with the new Exynos (I hate them, but this time they might get things right).

[Kostas Gangstar]

All that RAM will probably be needed for Switch emulators unless they don't make them that much RAM hungry.

I don't know what boosts the 888 will offer for Dolphin and Citra but it's probably going to make more resolutions available at max fps for some games and perhaps some will finally run max fps at 1x (those rare cases)

Anyway I'm satisfied with an 720G in current emulators with 2x res in dolphin and 2x, 3x or even 4x res in citra and the phone offers me extras which miss from 855 and higher phones so I'm not upgrading until a system that can't be emulated on my phone comes to android. (Switch obviously but I heard that 7xx chips might play some light games)

[mbc07]

(01-12-2021, 11:38 AM)vlbastos Wrote: 5. Adreno is a bitch for the devs. S888 still uses Adreno. I don't expect S888 to fix anything the devs hate in Adreno. Maybe we would be better served using a Mali chipset like the new Exynos (which, by the way, uses the same CPU setup as S888). Or wait until the much-hyped AMD GPUs come to mobile phones (again, on future Exynos chipsets).

Both Adreno and Mali drivers are still buggy nowadays, although they've been slowly improving with time. Right now, Adreno seems to have fewer issues than Mali, but they're still far from the ideal "just works" state of the NVIDIA drivers from the Tegra X1, for example, or from any PC driver with full fat OpenGL/Vulkan support. The future Exynos SoCs with AMD GPUs can be a godsend for Android users but only if they come with good driver support out of the box (and they certainly will do if AMD/Samsung builds them on top of the existing open-source Linux driver)...

[Aggro_hamtaro]

(01-12-2021, 11:38 AM)vlbastos Wrote: 4. As for texture packs: Adreno and Mali don't support DXT texture compression, so we're stuck with PNG packs, which don't help the gaming performance. I opened a feature request, requesting support for ASTC texture compression, which is supported by Adreno and Mali, and would probably fix the performance impact of such texture packs. Let's hope the devs like this idea and implement it.
5. Adreno is a bitch for the devs. S888 still uses Adreno. I don't expect S888 to fix anything the devs hate in Adreno. Maybe we would be better served using a Mali chipset like the new Exynos (which, by the way, uses the same CPU setup as S888). Or wait until the much-hyped AMD GPUs come to mobile phones (again, on future Exynos chipsets).
6. In all, I don't see much improvement on S888 over S865, Dolphin-wise. I'd say go for the cheapest, or go with the new Exynos (I hate them, but this time they might get things right).

Anyway we can support this request ? Would be amazing if they could implement this ASTC support.

[vlbastos]

(01-12-2021, 06:49 PM)mbc07 Wrote: Both Adreno and Mali drivers are still buggy nowadays, although they've been slowly improving with time. Right now, Adreno seems to have fewer issues than Mali, but they're still far from the ideal "just works" state of the NVIDIA drivers from the Tegra X1, for example, or from any PC driver with full fat OpenGL/Vulkan support. The future Exynos SoCs with AMD GPUs can be a godsend for Android users but only if they come with good driver support out of the box (and they certainly will do if AMD/Samsung builds them on top of the existing open-source Linux driver)...

Exynos 2100 just launched, confirming the CPU setup just like S888, but with a little more MHz added. Maybe more cache too, they said "better" cache. GPU isn't the much-hoped AMD GPU, just an incremental Mali G78 with 14 cores or whatever that is. I still think Mali will do better than Adreno because of better support/feedback/conformity, but honestly I know nothing about mobile GPU coding so I might be wrong. Just checked the Mali papers and stuff, they claim "free" 4x MSAA with minimal performance hit (I don't see that in my Adreno here, sh*t gets pretty heavy when I turn on 2x MSAA, let alone 4x), and some funky Framebuffer Compression thingy that sounded neat I think?
Anyways, I'm having problems getting 3D Stereoscopy to work with my Adreno (black screen in right eye), and it probably has something to do with Geometry Shaders, so I'm hoping Mali supports that properly, unlike Adreno.

[vlbastos]

(01-12-2021, 10:34 PM)Aggro_hamtaro Wrote: Anyway we can support this request ? Would be amazing if they could implement this ASTC support.

Feel free to second my request here:
https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-feature-request-thread?pid=514740#pid514740

No devs reacted to that request yet ?

[vlbastos]

Looks like this is not the year to buy a flagship yet:
"Today during the Exynos 2100 launch event, Samsung's Dr. Inyup Kang, VP and GM of the System LSI division, confirmed that their partnership with AMD on integrating a next-generation RDNA based GPU will be coming to fruition with the next generation flagship Exynos design."
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16408/samsung-confirms-amd-rdna-gpu-in-next-exynos-flagship

And as hinted by famous leaker @UniverseIce, it might be coming with Galaxy Z Fold 3:
https://mobile.twitter.com/UniverseIce/status/1349006618302836738

Now THAT'S worthy upgrading!

[mbc07]

(01-13-2021, 10:22 AM)vlbastos Wrote: I still think Mali will do better than Adreno because of better support/feedback/conformity, but honestly I know nothing about mobile GPU coding so I might be wrong.

Well, I highly doubt that. At least with Dolphin, the Adreno GPU found in the flagship Snapdragon SoC of the year keeps consistently beating the Mali GPU found in the flagship Exynos SoC of the same year since 2017 at least. Like I said, both have buggy drivers, but Adreno seems to be the less buggy of the two at the moment...