You guys are heroes. Truly the kings and queens of emulator developers. If only every emulator could have as incredible developers as you all.
Metroid Prime Trilogy is the primary game I play Dolphin for, and the stuttering drives me nuts, at least for when the game starts. Every time I started the game, I had to do a ritual of getting all the shaders to generate kind of like in the .gifs in that article (although whenever it happened, the game would also flicker black constantly until I went to the main menu and returned to the game, making the process even more grueling). Afterwards, the game is generally fine, and I rarely had performance issues. It wasn't that big of a deal, and I definitely didn't begrudge anyone for the problem (that some people were so disgruntled over this is kind of sad), but it definitely made sitting down to play the games not nearly as simple of a task as playing any other game I own.
Downloaded the latest development build of Dolphin, tried it on Exclusive, but that had the game running below 60 fps half the time (on my Intel i7/16GB RAM/GTX 980 at 1080p with 8x MSAA and 16x AF, but I generally have solid 60 fps with Direct3D 12). However, no black flickering/stuttering! Exited the game, set it to Hyrbid, started the game, and it ran at 60 fps with no significant drops! It did stutter quite a bit though, which mad me think to disable the External Frame Buffer, since it might no longer be needed now that there's this new shader solution. Turned it off, no black bar, and much less stuttering! But for the ultimate test, I rebooted the computer, started it on Hybrid with a disabled XFB, and still no black bar! So it seems that the ubershader solution has negated the need for Virtual XFB with the Prime games, which is fantastic. I thought that the solution to the Prime games' issues wouldn't be solved for years, but that they've been solved within two years of solving the black bar is astounding.
Unfortunate that Direct3D 12 had to be axed just before this breakthrough, as D3D12 had the best performance in Prime (for me), so that plus this solution may have fixed the minor stutters that remained and have the game running perfectly. But apparently the death of D3D12 was what allowed the ubershader solution to be completed. Hopefully with more improvements and optimizations down the road, it'll become flawless.
Thanks for all the great work. You guys are making dreams come true for a lot of people.
Metroid Prime Trilogy is the primary game I play Dolphin for, and the stuttering drives me nuts, at least for when the game starts. Every time I started the game, I had to do a ritual of getting all the shaders to generate kind of like in the .gifs in that article (although whenever it happened, the game would also flicker black constantly until I went to the main menu and returned to the game, making the process even more grueling). Afterwards, the game is generally fine, and I rarely had performance issues. It wasn't that big of a deal, and I definitely didn't begrudge anyone for the problem (that some people were so disgruntled over this is kind of sad), but it definitely made sitting down to play the games not nearly as simple of a task as playing any other game I own.
Downloaded the latest development build of Dolphin, tried it on Exclusive, but that had the game running below 60 fps half the time (on my Intel i7/16GB RAM/GTX 980 at 1080p with 8x MSAA and 16x AF, but I generally have solid 60 fps with Direct3D 12). However, no black flickering/stuttering! Exited the game, set it to Hyrbid, started the game, and it ran at 60 fps with no significant drops! It did stutter quite a bit though, which mad me think to disable the External Frame Buffer, since it might no longer be needed now that there's this new shader solution. Turned it off, no black bar, and much less stuttering! But for the ultimate test, I rebooted the computer, started it on Hybrid with a disabled XFB, and still no black bar! So it seems that the ubershader solution has negated the need for Virtual XFB with the Prime games, which is fantastic. I thought that the solution to the Prime games' issues wouldn't be solved for years, but that they've been solved within two years of solving the black bar is astounding.
Unfortunate that Direct3D 12 had to be axed just before this breakthrough, as D3D12 had the best performance in Prime (for me), so that plus this solution may have fixed the minor stutters that remained and have the game running perfectly. But apparently the death of D3D12 was what allowed the ubershader solution to be completed. Hopefully with more improvements and optimizations down the road, it'll become flawless.
Thanks for all the great work. You guys are making dreams come true for a lot of people.
