Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

There are slowdowns in Mario Kart Wii, epecially noticeable in the initial menu when selecting stuff and that button effect is showing. The D3D9 plugin is much smoother, ingame too. I'm using hte same options, I can post them if they're important.

My naive question is : Why isn't this plugin better/faster than D3D9, since the DX10/11 libraries are superior ?

Still, it's better than the OGL plugin, blehhh.

Quote:since the DX10/11 libraries are superior

That's an assumption. Newer does not mean better. d3d10/10.1/11 is far less restrictive than d3d9 but that does not make it more efficient overall (although it is more efficient in some ways).

Regardless of that even a better API/libraries does not guarantee a person making a backend based on it will make a better backend. You have MANY factors to consider. The quality of the code for the backend and how the drivers compile that code both play a huge role.

TL : DR: It's not faster/better because it's different, simply as that.

I have no experience with gfx coding, but I've read that the newer libraries allow for more efficient code. Why did they sacrifice backward compatibility ?

I mainly would like to know if there is room for future speed improvement over the D3D9 plugin. Because graphically I'm very satisfied by both, except for the long-standing bloom offset bug (=scaling bug?)

Quote:Why did they sacrifice backward compatibility ?

Quote:DX10 was the first to break this trend because the lower level driver model needed improving and this meant a DX rewrite breaking this chain of backwards compatibility, what they did in the end was write a new version of DX9.0c for Vista called DX9L which dealt with all the legacy stuff on vista. We should return to backwards compatible updates for DX10 onwards so DX10 effects can run natively with DX11 and when DX12 comes out it will perform both DX11 and DX10 effects natively, and so on.

Basically they needed to improve some low level stuff which required a complete rewrite.

Quote:I mainly would like to know if there is room for future speed improvement over the D3D9 plugin.

Yes. But if you're asking "will it ever be faster than the d3d9 backend" nobody knows, not even the developers.

I don't know about you but for me the bloom offset goes away in 3.0 is I use a 1x internal resolution. Therefore I must assume the cause it simply the emulator attempting to do something that the game was not designed for (rendering at a higher resolution), which in that case it is likely unfixable.

I tested it on Mario kart (changed from 2x native to 1x), bloom is as bad as with 2x and the game looks kinda crap.

Which backend/settings?

Fullscreen @ 1680x1050
Render To Main = False

Graphics Backend = Direct3D11
Internal Resolution = Native
MSAA = 0
Anisotropic Filtering = 2
Scaled EFB copy = True
Force Filtering = False
Per Pixel Lighting = False
Skip EFB access = False
Ignore format changes = True
EFB Copy Enabled to Texture, cache disabled.
Safe texture cache enabled, samples = 128
XFB is disabled
Fast mipmaps = True
Disable per pixel depth = True
Cache Display Lists = False
Disable Fog = False

This is a gfx glitch, right ? Look at the strip line. I think this makes the game look too blurry.

Turn off fast mipmaps (shouldn't make a difference), turn off scaled efb copy (shouldn't make a difference but just to be sure), change your backend to d3d9. Tell me if you get the same results.

I fired up the game on my console and it's the same thing on those checkerboard boxes at the strip line. Ahem, disregard my complaint. :-D

I don't mean to crash anybody's party, but I actually get much smoother gameplay, especially in Mario Kart Wii on Dx11 with OpenCL. In Dx9, I can't get over 40fps, and in Dx11, it runs at 50fps, 100%. And it's being run from a DVD too.