Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Or we could finish what we've got. I wouldn't mind a fast directX 11 plugin, and mac and linux users need the opengl speeding up before it gets replaced by a brand new one which will need writing from scratch.

(03-08-2012, 08:02 AM)ExtremeDude2 Wrote: [ -> ]

(03-08-2012, 05:21 AM)neobrain Wrote: [ -> ]It's kinda correct though. OpenGL is just a terrible API to code for >_>
OGL 3.0 is a bit nicer, but requiring D3D10-level hardware just to have a nice API sounds a bit overkill.

Its time for...a new plugin

http://xkcd.com/927/

Figures a Linux guy would suggest that we all use OpenGL. Here's an idea, you keep your one option and I'll be over here deciding out of the three back-ends which I want to use. Don't drag us all down with you.

Quote:http://xkcd.com/927/

Exactly.

(03-08-2012, 08:41 AM)scummos Wrote: [ -> ]

(03-08-2012, 08:02 AM)ExtremeDude2 Wrote: [ -> ]

(03-08-2012, 05:21 AM)neobrain Wrote: [ -> ]It's kinda correct though. OpenGL is just a terrible API to code for >_>
OGL 3.0 is a bit nicer, but requiring D3D10-level hardware just to have a nice API sounds a bit overkill.

Its time for...a new plugin

http://xkcd.com/927/

I was just kidding btw

I haven't programmed in OpenGL 3.0 yet, but what I've seen looks better than some of the stuff I have to do in 1.4. Seems like since most hardware is just now getting around to supporting 3.0 and above, even on the low-end of consumer computers, most OGL programmers have had to content themselves with using 2.0 at the most, and falling back on older versions when those 2.0 features aren't supported. Doesn't help that drivers were screwy from some vendors as well, hence inconsistencies across different hardware even with the same API. Bit of a bad situation if you ask me.

(03-08-2012, 08:56 AM)Starscream Wrote: [ -> ]Figures a Linux guy would suggest that we all use OpenGL. Here's an idea, you keep your one option and I'll be over here deciding out of the three back-ends which I want to use. Don't drag us all down with you.

Hey, I'm a Linux guy too. It's all about choice, really. More options benefit more people. Just have to make sure we can effectively maintain them all. No one wants 7 graphics plugins, but only two or three really work. Dolphin's got that balance.

If I knew more about OGL and how Dolphin's GPU emulation worked, I'd gladly see if I could contribute to the OGL plugin. Alas, I can hardly get a simple FPS camera to work right in OGL. I'm good with 2D stuff though. :p

Quote:Dolphin is generally optimized for Windows Os and that's why you see better performance in the Windows side.

And how exactly is a programmer supposed to optimize an application like this for a specific OS? The fact that dolphin performs better in windows has nothing to do with code optimizations.

Quote:OpenGL could be faster than Direct3D if Dolphin was optimized for it.

.................................that makes no sense. Not to mention you don't have any evidence for that.

(03-10-2012, 05:03 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:Dolphin is generally optimized for Windows Os and that's why you see better performance in the Windows side.

And how exactly is a programmer supposed to optimize an application like this for a specific OS? The fact that dolphin performs better in windows has nothing to do with code optimizations.

Quote:OpenGL could be faster than Direct3D if Dolphin was optimized for it.

.................................that makes no sense. Not to mention you don't have any evidence for that.

I often agree with you, but this time I don't. Of course applications can be more or less optimized for a certain platform. Some programming patterns are faster on one OS than they are on another. If you do all your profiling and testing on platform A, your program is likely to run faster on A than it will run on B. And please don't try to tell me that windows is always faster in executing a program which does integer operations on the CPU than $other_platform because $other_platform is garbage. That's just nonsense.

Same thing goes with D3D vs. OpenGL. There is no reason why OpenGL should be slower than D3D (except that some combinations of "graphics card+OS" have crappy drivers for it). It was proven often enough that OpenGL, if programmed correctly, isn't any slower than D3D. Also, OpenGL usually gives access to new technologies API-wise much earlier than D3D and can thus easily be faster (use native functionality >> implement it yourself). Thus, of course, how fast an application is when using OpenGL/D3d mainly depends on the amount of work that particular code has received. I consider any discussion about this somewhat futile -- I think it's really rather obvious.

Quote:I often agree with you, but this time I don't. Of course applications can be more or less optimized for a certain platform. Some programming patterns are faster on one OS than they are on another. If you do all your profiling and testing on platform A, your program is likely to run faster on A than it will run on B. And please don't try to tell me that windows is always faster in executing a program which does integer operations on the CPU than $other_platform because $other_platform is garbage. That's just nonsense.

Not in a significant way no. If you use the same libraries/frameworks in all three you should see nearly identical performance no matter how you write your code (unless you have an application that is heavily dependent on driver performance).

And saying "platform" is not the same thing as saying "OS", as I'm sure you already know the OS is only one part of the platform.

Quote:Same thing goes with D3D vs. OpenGL. There is no reason why OpenGL should be slower than D3D (except that some combinations of "graphics card+OS" have crappy drivers for it). It was proven often enough that OpenGL, if programmed correctly, isn't any slower than D3D. Also, OpenGL usually gives access to new technologies API-wise much earlier than D3D and can thus easily be faster (use native functionality >> implement it yourself). Thus, of course, how fast an application is when using OpenGL/D3d mainly depends on the amount of work that particular code has received.

Saying that openGL can be just as fast as direct3d or faster in certain circumstances does not mean dolphin should be just as fast with openGL. They're two completely different frameworks for gods sakes! Often times direct3d is going to be much faster than openGL even if you spend loads of times optimizing both backends, it just depends on what you're doing.

Quote:I consider any discussion about this somewhat futile -- I think it's really rather obvious.

Agreed, but apparently not (as this discussion proves).

(03-11-2012, 05:58 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]Not in a significant way no. If you use the same libraries/frameworks in all three you should see nearly identical performance no matter how you write your code (unless you have an application that is heavily dependent on driver performance).

For example, dolphin is compiled with msvc on windows and with g++ on linux. That definitely is a significant difference. Of course there's many cases where it won't matter, but there's definitely cases where it *does* matter. Even in my 3-line-test program here I can easily see that virtual function calls are faster in clang++ than in g++, and dynamic_casts are faster in g++ than in clang++. I don't have msvc here for testing, but I'm *absolutely* sure there will also be differences.

Quote:And saying "platform" is not the same thing as saying "OS", as I'm sure you already know the OS is only one part of the platform.

I used those two interchangably here, as it was clear from the context that we're only talking about PCs. But we both know what is meant

Quote: Often times direct3d is going to be much faster than openGL even if you spend loads of times optimizing both backends

and often it will be the other way around.

Greetings,
Sven