Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

@Axxer - I have not installed Windows on my computer, so I can't exactly tell you how Slackware compares to Windows 7 for Dolphin. I can tell you that I have not encountered any problem that would have made me consider switching. OpenGL performance on Linux is quite good, as far as I can tell. Aside from documented game glitches (such as those on the wiki), the games play as I would expect them to on the actual hardware (albeit in HD :p)

I'm really glad Dolphin has such great Linux support. A year and a half ago, I seriously wasn't expecting GC/Wii emulation to be viable on my distro. My mentality was formed after having observed that emulators on Linux for the Saturn, Dreamcast, and even the N64 were behind their Windows counterparts. I kinda expected the same for the GC and Wii. But imagine my surprise when I got TimeSplitters 2 running almost perfectly. Sometimes I'm still impressed that I can play these games on my computer.

If you are going to be testing on Linux, feel free to add some more entries to the Dolphin wiki. You probably won't find a lot of difference in terms of compatibility, but it's just nice to know that different operating systems are being looked at. A lot of games haven't been "tested" on Linux yet. I kinda joined with that purpose in mind, as you can still see from my custom user title.

I installed Windows 8 Release Preview for now, but I'll probably dual boot into Linux so I can see if the speed/compatibility becomes a problem (maybe then I could save $100). I'll definitely add stuff to the wiki as I find it.

EDIT: @NaturalViolence The transcoding for commands and stuff for the Wii/GC GPU has a thread on the CPU, so it would make sense that it would effect both I suppose.

If performance is basically equal in SMG, then I won't worry about that. I'll still want to check some issues (like the bad shading in SS that occurs in d3d9/OpenGL but not d3d11 with 16x AF). Thanks

Quote:EDIT: @NaturalViolence The transcoding for commands and stuff for the Wii/GC GPU has a thread on the CPU, so it would make sense that it would effect both I suppose.

Not really, it's more complicated than that. Neither CPU load or GPU load significantly increases when using the openGL backend on windows. It's basically just a problem with the drivers being poorly optimized (I'm not totally sure what the problem is exactly).

...well then that's just stupid. I guess it makes sense since most games use DirectX, but it still seems stupid.

Nvidia/AMD have no reason to spend millions of dollars developing drivers to better optimize applications that don't exist or aren't popular. So it makes perfect sense. There are a few popular openGL applications (mostly professional tools) that their windows drivers are well optimized for and that's about it.

There may be other causes besides this though.

True true. Doesn't make it any less crappy though. If I was in that position I would definitely do the same, but it is just an unfortunate situation.

To be fair different GPU architectures have different drivers, and the architecture itself does influence performance in a big way. Some drivers/architectures actually do perform very well with openGL in the windows environment. The 400/500 series cards from nvidia for example perform very well with the openGL backend in windows, in fact sometimes they outperform the d3d9 backend depending on the game and settings.

Yeah... whatever. I just wish that the industry would agree on a standard of some sort so that games could be more easily playable on different platforms. OpenGL is supposed to be that standard, but Microsoft was smart with DirectX and took the market essentially.

500 would include the 550 Ti? Maybe I should try it out and see the speed difference.

Quote:500 would include the 550 Ti?

Yes.

What exactly does the "Ti" mean then? I never quite understood that.