As Dolphin currently has a multitude of different options, I thought it would be convenient to have a thread where various settings are explained. The following are based on my personal experience with the emulator as a user and guesswork, so you're welcome to point out any inaccuracies (especially with informative explanations like the one for the "Lock threads to core" option on another thread) and I'll edit the post.
* EFB scale: This affects how the screen is calculated to be displayed. I find that the recommended setting (Integral) gives the most faithful render, while Fractional, although less accurate, is easier on the fps. Integral makes a huge visual difference in games with pixelation issues like RE: TUC.
* Force Bi/Trilinear filtering: Well, forces bi/trilinear filtering. While it can smooth out some jaggies, I find that it introduces artifacts in most games (for example Endless Ocean, Rune factory, HOTD 1&2, HV:TOT, etc.) but it's needed for visual accuracy in a few others (like HV: AP).
* Anisotropic filtering: For the life of me, I can't spot any differences between x4 and x16, even in 3D games. Furthermore, I don't seem to get any fps drop with higher settings which I find rather peculiar.
* OpenCL: It uses the GPU for faster texture loading in Nvidia cards; I haven't seen any real benefit in practice.
(To be continued; feel free to chime in with any additions/corrections.)
Their are multiple settings guides out their are many fansites. In fact I'm currently working on one myself:
http://naturalviolence.webs.com/general.htm
It's a work in progress though. Still haven;t gone over it to correct the errors or finished all of the graphics plugin settings.
Quote:* EFB scale: This affects how the screen is calculated to be displayed. I find that the recommended setting (Integral) gives the most faithful render, while Fractional, although less accurate, is easier on the fps. Integral makes a huge visual difference in games with pixelation issues like RE: TUC.
This has nothing to do with "how the screen is calculated to be displayed", in fact I'm not even sure what you're trying to say there. This is simply the resolution that the efb is rendered and copied at, where 640 x 480, the native resolution is 1x, 2x means double width and double height (1280 x 960), 3x is triple width triple height (1920 x 1440). Since I don't feel on writing out the rest I'll just copy paste from my own guide. The higher your resolution is the higher efb scale needs to be set to remove the "bluriness" in some games. Auto integral will set the value to 1 2 or 3 based on your resolution. Fractional sets it to a precise value (such as 2.3048950359) based on your resolution which allows to perfect scaling (so if your screen resolution is 1280 x 1024 the efb will be rendered and copied at 1280 x 1024). AA will only work properly with fractional scaling but certain efb effects will not work properly with fractional.
Quote:* Force Bi/Trilinear filtering: Well, forces bi/trilinear filtering. While it can smooth out some jaggies, I find that it introduces artifacts in most games (for example Endless Ocean, Rune factory, HOTD 1&2, HV:TOT, etc.) but it's needed for visual accuracy in a few others (like HV: AP).
This has absolutely nothing to do with smoothing out jagies. This simply forces bilinear or trilinear mipmapping to be used for mipmap textures. Which is helpful for improving the quality of 2D games and games that use lots of prerendered backgrounds like resident evil. However is breaks many textures in many games and is generally not recommended for 3D games.
Quote:* Anisotropic filtering: For the life of me, I can't spot any differences between x4 and x16, even in 3D games. Furthermore, I don't seem to get any fps drop with higher settings which I find rather peculiar.
This simply samples textures using an anisotropic filter instead of an isotropic filter. Since modern video cards have far more texture fillrate than dolphin needs it should not affect performance. It will massively improve the quality of textures that are at a very obtuse angle from the camera.
Quote:* OpenCL: It uses the GPU for faster texture loading in Nvidia cards; I haven't seen any real benefit in practice.
In most games it has no affect but it some it can reduce stuttering by a lot (mario kart wii for example) and in some games it can even help improve your framerate (metroid prime 2 for example).
There is also a Oficial Dolphin Config Guide, but I dont know if it was ever released.... There community that aim to translate it to various languages, I am part of it, but the original English one is there as a template, I think it should come with Dolphin, but it doesnt, I dont know why...
Well, I couldn't find a faq with detailed explanations about the various settings, but since there seems to be one or two I guess this thread is redundant. Thanks for the excellent clarifications, though I still have a question about the Integral/Fractional rendering: Since fractional is supposed to do more accurate scaling, why is it that it looks much worse (lots of jaggies) than integral at 1366x768? And why then it's noticeably faster than integral?
(11-30-2010, 10:05 AM)mavlok Wrote: [ -> ]Well, I couldn't find a faq with detailed explanations about the various settings, but since there seems to be one or two I guess this thread is redundant. Thanks for the excellent clarifications, though I still have a question about the Integral/Fractional rendering: Since fractional is supposed to do more accurate scaling, why is it that it looks much worse (lots of jaggies) than integral at 1366x768? And why then it's noticeably faster than integral?
Fractional can up the resolution to the exact resolution of your monitor while integral if it can't match it with an integral value it will go higher of your resolution monitor, providing results similar to antialiasing in a sense. In your case it might go up to 1920 x 1440 internally, while your monitor supports only 1366x768 and that's why it is probably a lot slower too.
^What he said.
At your resolution, 1366 x 768, integral will set the scale to 2x (1280 x 960) which is 1.25MP while fractional will scale to 1366 x 768 which is 1MP. Therefore the efb resolution is 25% higher with integral at that resolution.
Thanks a lot guys, that cleared it up.
Fwiw, the actual native EFB resolution is 640x528
This thread is actually not a bad idea (wondering why there hasn't been anything like this before in this forum O_o); I think what you should do is two things for each setting/option:
1. have a technical explanation about what the setting means and what it does (not tooooo detailed, but still the devs would have to help here)
2. saying in layman's terms what the setting is useful for, what issues and advantages it brings.
When it's kinda finished and polished, it'll be good to have it added to the support page of mamario's site (do we call it the official Dolphin site now, btw?)
About bi-/trilinear filtering: Actually, I have it enabled most of the time and there's not many games that have issues with it. It's mostly Full Motion Videos that are garbled with it and some strange effects like the SMS goop. It smoothes out 2D sprites, HUD elements n stuff, but that has nothing to do with higher accuracy. (I'm no dev though
)
You should take ViRGE's explanation about "lock threads to core" from the DKCR thread, btw...and I'm sure there were some fights about the definition of EFB between NeoBrain, NaturalViolence and some more somewhere in the forums xD
(12-02-2010, 09:04 PM)StripTheSoul Wrote: [ -> ]do we call it the official Dolphin site now, btw?)
yep.
(12-02-2010, 09:04 PM)StripTheSoul Wrote: [ -> ]About bi-/trilinear filtering: Actually, I have it enabled most of the time and there's not many games that have issues with it. It's mostly Full Motion Videos that are garbled with it and some strange effects like the SMS goop. It smoothes out 2D sprites, HUD elements n stuff, but that has nothing to do with higher accuracy. (I'm no dev though )
yeah, that option forces filtering to be enabled in places where the game wouldn't use it, so it might cause glitches in a limited number of games.
(12-02-2010, 09:04 PM)StripTheSoul Wrote: [ -> ]and I'm sure there were some fights about the definition of EFB between NeoBrain, NaturalViolence and some more somewhere in the forums xD
Yeah, but (no offense) I'm right
The EFB resolution is the resolution used to render everything at. That resolution will get stretched to the display resolution.
About the other stuff: yeah, prolly would be a good idea.. someone probably should update the tooltips of the options. Explaining stuff on the forums tends to be useless since that kind of question gets asked over and over again no matter how often you explain it ;P