Taking perfect comparison screenshots

[ENAI]

Hello!

I'm trying to take accurate comparison screenshots of games to see how much different settings affect the visuals for optimisation and to satisfy my curiosity, but encountered a small-ish problem that someone might be able to help with.

Although I've always found Dolphin's settings and menus to be handy and intuitive, only this lastest little project made me notice that the changed settings get applied only on the next frame drawn, which would usually be a non-issue, but for comparison shots is just that tiny bit inconvenient. I'm aware that I'm being fairly unreasonable (and might have overlooked an easy solution to achieve this) but would love to know if there is for example a way to force a redraw of the current frame with the new settings. A single frame of difference is of course technically perfectly fine, but the perfectionist in me would really prefer to have the exact same shot in both comparison pics.

I already tried saving and loading states as well as running two instances simultaneously, but neither allowed me to reliably have the right settings applied at the right frame.

If anyone knows how to get perfect comparison screenshots of different settings, I hope you can help me out, and thank you for your time!

[JosJuice]

If you record a FIFO log (.dff file) that is one frame long, you can later play it back looped and get the same frame over and over. Other than that, I don't believe there's a way to do what you want.

[MayImilae]

You can record a fifolog at as many frames as you want, then set the specific frame in the fifoplayer. A bit easier then trying to grab a specific frame while recording.

Fifologs are how most of the comparison images in the Dolphin Progress Report are made. We even combine it with our hardware fifo player so we can get matching comparisons from console too. It's a super capable tool!

Just be warned that fifologs aren't perfect and it won't work for absolutely everything. Also play fifologs in single core, you're welcome.

[ENAI]

Thank you to both of you for the quick response! I've read about the FIFO system before but never really got too much into what it's capable of, definitely checking it out next over the weekend. Thanks again so much for guiding me on the right path!

[MayImilae]

We have a little guide for it - https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=FifoPlayer