Why do games still have choppy sound and slow motion even on a snapdragon 835?

[biomedical1010]

I hear that Dolphin on any Android chip aside from Nvidia is unplayable.

When will Dolphin on android exit the experimental phase?

Is that even possible with the drivers qualcomm gives?

[JMC47]

Emulating a GameCube is demanding.

Current Phones are just on the edge of powerful enough to run some games.

Inefficient drivers push us under that threshold in most cases.

Better drivers would help, but, the processors are still nowhere near as strong as desktop solutions.

[biomedical1010]

(02-18-2018, 04:28 AM)JMC47 Wrote: Emulating a GameCube is demanding.

Current Phones are just on the edge of powerful enough to run some games.

Inefficient drivers push us under that threshold in most cases.

Better drivers would help, but, the processors are still nowhere near as strong as desktop solutions.

So the snapdragon 845 will seal the deal?

[JonnyH]

(02-18-2018, 04:31 AM)biomedical1010 Wrote: So the snapdragon 845 will seal the deal?

Probably not, it'll be an incremental improvement for sure, so "more" games will likely work at a playable speed, but not all. Remember, some games use features that are extremely expensive to emulate - some don't even work on the latest desktop CPUs at full speed in some cases.

Plus, many of the issues with performance end up being due to things like GPU drivers being inefficient or missing useful features - sometimes these cause things like excess synchronisation between the CPU and GPU, which means the performance doesn't even scale directly with improved CPU performance - as much of the time is waiting on the overhead of the synchronization and the communication fabric rather than the processing units themselves.

[biomedical1010]

(02-18-2018, 04:38 AM)JonnyH Wrote: Probably not, it'll be an incremental improvement for sure, so "more" games will likely work at a playable speed, but not all. Remember, some games use features that are extremely expensive to emulate - some don't even work on the latest desktop CPUs at full speed in some cases.

Plus, many of the issues with performance end up being due to things like GPU drivers being inefficient or missing useful features - sometimes these cause things like excess synchronisation between the CPU and GPU, which means the performance doesn't even scale directly with improved CPU performance - as much of the time is waiting on the overhead of the synchronization and the communication fabric rather than the processing units themselves.

Why does Qualcomm hate drivers so much? Why do they even bother making more powerful hardware if they refuse to make drivers for it?

The guys behind the Principle of Talos game also said the reason their games came to the shield but not Snapdragon is cause the horrible drivers which they were't able to work around.

I'm frank amazed the dolphin people are still trying to make it work even after 5 years of fruitless effort.

[Helios]

Often times, bugs are fixed upstream but due to how android is structured, phone vendors won't take driver updates because they're terrified of breaking things and/or re-certifying is a huge pain.

Also, mobile vendors tend to have driver teams a fraction of the size of desktop GPU vendors

[biomedical1010]

(02-18-2018, 04:58 AM)Helios Wrote: Often times, bugs are fixed upstream but due to how android is structured, vendors won't take driver updates because they're terrified of breaking things and/or re-certifying is a huge pain.

Also, mobile vendors tend to have driver teams a fraction of the size of desktop GPU vendors

Why does Nvidia ARM devices have 1000 tiems superior drivers than Qualcomm despite the latter selling 100 times as many chips as Nvidia does?

Maybe they just don't give a damn.

[Helios]

nvidia controls the entire stack.

Android, driver, SoC. And no carrier to deal with.

nvidia says they're updating the driver, the driver gets updated.

There is no other vendor with this much control other than Apple.

Additionally, much of nvidia's GPU driver code is worked on by nvidia's *fucking massive* driver teams.

[biomedical1010]

Nvidia control Android?

[Helios]

Well, their own fork of android.

Every phone vendor basically forks android to use in their own device. They can do whatever they want with it.