Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I have some information for developers regarding Dolphin performance that I think they would find useful.

I was playing my parents Wii, playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 and I noticed something interesting. I was playing the Haunty Halls galaxy and noticed something on the real hardware when looking around.

On the real hardware, distant objects and parts of the boards are being culled. This means the further you are away, distant objects and parts of the level aren't rendered on screen, and anything off screen isn't rendered at all.

Culling is a performance enhancing technique that is used on PC games, and seems exist on titles for the Gamecube and Wii, supported by the actual hardware.

While this feature exists on the actual hardware, support for culling seems to be completely absent from Dolphin, meaning that everything in the level is being rendered at once thus decreasing performance. This has more of an effect in games with big areas such as Zelda: Twilight Princess with Hyrule Field, Resident Evil 4 in the larger areas with enemies, and other games.

When I was playing Haunty Halls in SMG2 on the Wii, distant objects and parts of the level were invisible and not being rendered on screen. Depending on how I moved the camera, I was able to adjust the camera and make the parts of the level reappear that were being culled. This is not the case on Dolphin, I tried the same exact thing on Dolphin as I did the Wii, and everything in the level is being rendered no matter what.

This is likely what has been impacting performance so much, and is probably the culprit behind many popular/known issues such as the Hyrule Field slowdowns and performance issues in various other games. I'm quite sure now that the Hyrule Field issue can be resolved by culling of on screen geometry and optimization of the pipeline flush, just don't forget about fifo improvements and optimization of the fifo.

I hope this information will be useful to the developers and will aid them in fixing the various performance issues that currently plague Dolphin.

Did some more testing and it appears I was wrong, culling is working. I thought it wasn't working yesterday since at the time, I couldn't reproduce the same thing as on the actual system, however I managed to reproduce the same thing in Dolphin as on the actual hardware today.

Sorry if I wasted anyone's time.

But after things like auto frame skip will not work in dolphin, something like auto culling radius could help users to get fps up.

Yeah, isn't this just called a "far clipping plane?"

Lots of things use this, I started suspecting this when I read "Dolphin apparently renders the entire of Hyrule field"

Come to think of it, if distant objects are being "culled" in Mario Galaxy 2, well you know you can look around the stage in first person, and start grabbing star-bits?

Maybe if objects are not being culled like you say in Mario Galaxy 2, you will be able to grab distant star-bits, that you would not be able to on the actual hardware?