Will there be a compatibility tracker for android?

[yourselfhere]

i hope i am not being rude with this post. i recently used dolphin on my realme 3 pro (snapdragon 710) and tried to run the first nfs underground and it was really struggling, i didn't really expect this from a more or less old game considering i saw it run a fair bit of games at decent speeds on youtube. i am not here to complain about why my phone doesn't run everything, but it would be pretty neat if there was a compatibility list that could tell me if low performance on a specific game is to be expected or give people a better idea of specs for someone to expect to run games at full speed.
it seems like it could work where entering their data in the list prompted them to enter their device model, its specs, emulator and os versions and if the high performance mode was turned on. i am also willing to contribute to the testing if a compatibility tracker came to be.
and again, i am not here to complain about the emulator or the devs (though it would be nice if someone had some info to share on underground 1 ).

[JosJuice]

It would be quite hard to gather enough data about the performance on each device for a performance tracker to be useful, since there are so many different devices and games out there. I don't think we have any plans to add any compatibility tracking beyond what we already have at https://dolphin-emu.org/compat/, which doesn't really take performance into account.

For what it's worth, you can get some unstructured performance data by visiting the wiki page for each game (which is accessible by clicking on the game's name in the compatibility list I linked to).

[MayImilae]

Our compatibility list is all about tracking Dolphin's ability to emulate games. It was very useful early in Dolphin's life, as it let uses keep track of the rapid progress of development as games quickly improved and moved from not bootable to playable to perfect. But now that Dolphin is mature, more or less all games run perfectly now, so if we were to properly investigate and set everything up correctly, it would be just 5 stars for thousands of games, outside of a tiny tiny TINY fraction that isn't perfect in some way. But now that everything is more or less perfect on the game compatibility side, there's no point in keeping track of wider game compatibility improvements, and the compatibility list has lost its purpose. It's completely useless. And of course, once it became useless, everyone stopped bothering to update it, so it isn't even remotely accurate anymore. So what we have now is neglected and pointless, and we really should take it down one of these days. So with that in mind, I for one am certainly not in a hurry to make another one.

An Android compatibility list, if we were to ever make one, would have to be very different from our existing desktop one. All games (again, more or less) run perfectly in Dolphin now, but that is assuming great drivers that support everything we need. Android rarely has great drivers, with poor support or missing support of some features being commonplace. Those are very difficult to measure and reproduce in a way that works for a compatibility list, but it is possible. If we ignore the devices themselves and focus just the drivers themselves, which is the part that really matters anyway, then we miiiight be able to make an android driver compatibility chart. Like, if we made a piece of software that just runs through all of the expected features and tests to make sure they work, then we could compile that data from many devives and build a list all of the features that a driver supports and what they don't. If we combine that with information on the kind of bugs that those issues would lead to, that would be genuinely useful. It would be very different from our existing star system, and more of a spreadsheet than a nice little star sheet, but it would have useful data. In theory, you just look up your phone's SoC and then compare it to the driver list and you can get an idea of what glitches to expect. Still, that is a LOT of research, lots of development, plus it is a very constantly changing landscape with lots of exceptions and other landmines along the way so... I certainly wouldn't want to start that!

Also I know performance is an issue for Android devices but that is not something we could ever keep track of. Dolphin's performance demands vary game by game, as Dolphin tries to keep itself as light as possible and only use demanding features when a game asks for them. We could put a bunch of Android devices through a synthetic benchmark, but that would have very limited usefulness as a good score in the benchmark wouldn't necessarily mean a good result in the game a user wants to play. Plus, devices are benchmarked already. And of course, new SoCs come out every year so it's not like any of that data would be useful for very long. So um, yea, performance is not really something we can map.

[JosJuice]

(02-29-2020, 11:14 AM)MayImilae Wrote: All games (again, more or less) run perfectly in Dolphin now, but that is assuming great drivers that support everything we need.

And also assuming there are no bugs in the JIT – there are still a few of them in the ARM JIT. But just like there are Android devices with good drivers, there are Android devices that don't use ARM, so these problems are not universal to all Android devices.

[yourselfhere]

(02-29-2020, 06:46 AM)JosJuice Wrote: It would be quite hard to gather enough data about the performance on each device for a performance tracker to be useful, since there are so many different devices and games out there. I don't think we have any plans to add any compatibility tracking beyond what we already have at https://dolphin-emu.org/compat/, which doesn't really take performance into account.

For what it's worth, you can get some unstructured performance data by visiting the wiki page for each game (which is accessible by clicking on the game's name in the compatibility list I linked to).

maybe you are right but what if there was a way for users to manually add their data with mandatory hardware information. besides what is compatible for the pc version, may not be for android. like in prince of persia warrior within, all the colors are inverted on android and that doesn't seem to be case with PC version. inverted colors seem to be something that could be fixed if people knew in which specific case it exist.