Why is the dolphin performance getting worse with every release?

[Mac9]

I am currently testing dolphin on my phone. Trying to get any game running but more or less failing. But one game had my eye, Mario Kart. So I'm trying to get it running at a stable speed without getting permanent audio hickups but I'm failing miserably.
My phone is fairly powerfully with a Snapdragon 855 and is currently rocking position 8 (in Antutu), so one the fastest smartphones on market. What I'm trying to say, it shouldn't be the bottleneck here.
I've tested severall settings and thought, it shouldn't be so hard to get the game running, it is one the most played games on the Wii. Not a small game that didn't even ran well on the original Wii. It should have rationally thought one of the best support on dolphin.

Well and here am I, watching videos of the year 2017 when people where able to get Mario Kart running stable on a Snapdragon 835. This processor has a only a quarter of both CPU and GPU performance compared to SD 855. I am reading the reviews on the playstore app and people are complaining about bad performance and I can understand them. If the most powerfull processor on the smartphone market can't run qny game (okay sd855+ is a bit stronger), how should any have fun with dolphin?

[LG Fanatic]

The 855 despite its performance gains, is still a mobile chipset with certain limitations that desktop/laptop CPUs don't have. It can play a good number of GameCube and Wii games but don't expect full speed performance across the board. Some GameCube and Wii games will struggle a bit. The reason it seems dolphin is getting slower is old performance hacks are being removed for more accurate emulation. Those videos of dolphin on SD835 devices are on older builds and they are using hacks to increase speed and even then, don't show long term gameplay footage.

If you can understand those limitations and work within them, there's still quite a bit of fun to be had with dolphin.

[Helios]

A few likely reasons:

Your vendor is fixing their GPU drivers - not rendering various graphical effects, even almost unnoticeable ones, is faster than rendering them.

We've fixed a few graphics bugs on mobile here and there - Same thing as above. Not rendering is faster than rendering.

Your vendor is making the thermal management systems more aggressive - Phone vendors don't give a shit about emulator workloads. They care about boasting great battery life, and not dropping a bunch of frames in Chrome and Facebook or whatever. If that means that the CPU and GPU power management systems get confused at an emulator's workload and don't properly maintain max clocks or worse, assign Dolphin's JIT/GPU threads to small cores, they don't care.

We don't really check Android for performance regressions - Android support is generally at best effort. It compiles easy enough, we have a non-trivial number of Android users and maintenance is pretty minimal because it can share a lot of non-UI code. This is also why Android doesn't have a stable release and I don't think we count regressions in Android as release blockers. We don't really pay attention to it. Sorry. Can't find anybody to consistently care about mobile graphics or ARMv8 JIT stuff

[Nintonito]

Every Helios said but I’d like to add that your impression of the S855’s performance capability, especially in the CPU side is very incorrect. At best you are getting 2x the performance of the 835, and that is achieved in no small part to a large increase in the maximum power draw and heat generation. In other words, your effective performance is not going to be eclipsing the 835 by any means, unless you have one of very few devices that elect to allow high performance workloads to run unabated with high chassis temps (OnePlus devices, ROG Phone 2). The 835 was a particular high point for sustained performance on android as it simply had a much lower actual TDP then Qualcomm usually targets. This was not repeated in the successive chips, so most of the performance gains are lost in the CPU department. The GPU department is a different story with the switch to adreno 6xx, but aside from vulkan exposing some extra features as the drivers are updated, it’s very much irrelevant to dolphin performance currently. Android Q’s devices completely obliterated frame rates in dolphin, which is either sign of yet another regression or a surprising uplift in driver polish that enabled substantial improvements to rendering (which as Helios mentioned will actually hurt performance since rendering = less FPS).

TL: DR don’t overestimate the 855, it’s not quite the leap needed to raise dolphin performance.

[Mac9]

Thanks a lot for those many responses. So I checked out several things you said about the TDP of the SD 835 vs the SD 855 and you are right. If your interested I've got Xiaomi K20 Pro and I found out in a stress test that it is truly suffering from overheating. It downclocks itself about 20%. Still in comparison instead of 430k I get about 410k score which is a big loss. The GPU drivers also shouldn't be a issue, I've tested various modern games, PUBG, DBD, Asphalt 9 and they all run flawlessly at either a capped 30 or in PUBG a capped 60fps.

You said that it should run some old games.
Which games am I able to run on this chipset?

What I am trying to say, I love the work you guys do and the support you give, but as the PC version runs nearly flawless wouldn't be time now to also focus on the performance on Android?
Could there be an option to enable old speedhacks, that could make for example Mario Kart playable after a long time? I know you aren't good to talk to MMJ but he has focus on performance and achieving massive gains over many release.

[JosJuice]

(12-26-2019, 08:53 PM)Mac9 Wrote: The GPU drivers also shouldn't be a issue, I've tested various modern games, PUBG, DBD, Asphalt 9 and they all run flawlessly at either a capped 30 or in PUBG a capped 60fps.

That doesn't really prove anything. Modern games don't have to emulate the GameCube/Wii - they can design their graphical effects in a way that suits how the GPU driver works, whereas we can't decide how the graphical effects are designed.

The GPU drivers on Android phones have been getting better, but they're definitely not perfect.

[sirdaniel]

Its definitely important what device you have (model) and what Android version (along with drivers version) and finally what backend You use for rendering (ogl es or vulkan). Without this information you/we/nobody get any coclusion of the issue You rise.
As far i know MMJ did not build dolphin in 2017, did she/he? So to get better speed there might be more digging in dolphin options/ini's necesserry. Just as the people changed settings, whos videos You have been watching.

[onlyretrogames]

(12-26-2019, 10:33 AM)Mac9 Wrote: I am currently testing dolphin on my phone. Trying to get any game running but more or less failing. But one game had my eye, Mario Kart. So I'm trying to get it running at a stable speed without getting permanent audio hickups but I'm failing miserably.
My phone is fairly powerfully with a Snapdragon 855 and is currently rocking position 8 (in Antutu), so one the fastest smartphones on market. What I'm trying to say, it shouldn't be the bottleneck here.
I've tested severall settings and thought, it shouldn't be so hard to get the game running, it is one the most played games on the Wii. Not a small game that didn't even ran well on the original Wii. It should have rationally thought one of the best support on dolphin.

Well and here am I, watching videos of the year 2017 when people where able to get Mario Kart running stable on a Snapdragon 835. This processor has a only a quarter of both CPU and GPU performance compared to SD 855. I am reading the reviews on the playstore app and people are complaining about bad performance and I can understand them. If the most powerfull processor on the smartphone market can't run qny game (okay sd855+ is a bit stronger), how should any have fun with dolphin?

Whats up OP. I have a similar phone to yours (Note 10 +). By similar I mean CPU

I can run that game just fine, seems to be 60fps with no audio issues either. I'm just having issues with it recognizing a controller.

What settings do you have set in Dolphin? I agree that the phone's OS version is important. Android changes a lot sometimes. I'm running 10. My general settings:

CPU Core - JIT Arm64
Dual core - checked
Override Emu CPU clock speed - unchecked 
Speed limist: 100%
Audio stretching - unchecked
Allow mismatched region settings - unchecked

Hope I can help!