Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Quote:wouldn't it still be nice to add it in anyway for the retro gamers who prefer to play exactly as they did in their childhood?

You know that the GCN and Wii were designed to render natively in progressive right? Unless it's a really retro game that exploits the field rendering on CRT TVs, which a computer can't replicate anyway, you can still emulate any console game "exactly as they did in their childhood" by playing in progressive scan with zero artifacts (exception being PCSX2, that's complicated).


Interlacing was a hack developed to increase FPS without additional bandwidth use on analog signals for antennas. I'm not sure it would provide any GPU speed improvements. It's not like reducing the FPS, the GPU would still have to render the whole scene every frame, but then chop it up into pieces and display only part of the scene each frame.

Quote: The opposite is true. Most modern, dedicated graphics cards can run Dolphin in at least 1x IR (480p).

let me re-word. In most situations where people cannot run dolphin due to a weak computer, they do not have a modern, dedicated graphics card but they do have a good enough processor.

Quote: That GPU is too slow. Period. It won't run games full speed and it won't make anything look good.

Games I've managed to play at full speed at 480p include (but are not limited to) Super Mario Sunshine, The Legend of Zelda The Wind Waker, Kirby Air Ride, and The Legend of Zelda Twilight princess. (50-55 fps for TP, close enough :p) My GPU is only too slow for the average dolphin user who obviously isn't too familiar with computers.

Quote:Even then, who knows how well it would run.Your CPU probably wouldn't be able to handle Metroid Prime very well on that side of things.

My problem isn't running it perfect, that's not my goal. My goal is to average out to at least 30 fps, and considering when I use 480p the worst drops I get are 20-25 fps, low IR & interlacing with overclocking might just give it that small boost it needs.

Quote:The fact is, 1x IR looks exactly like the Wii does with 480p - a resolution the Wii supports if you get a cable for it. Most people won't notice a difference, just like I can hardly notice a difference. The GPU won't notice a difference really either.

I've heard something similar to this so many times, but never actually seen any testing for it. I'm sorry, but until Dolphin has an interlacing option, I'm not going to take your word that, especially considering I get random frame drops on my xbox 360 when i use 1080p over 1080i.

Quote:You know that the GCN and Wii were designed to render natively in progressive right?

You know that the original AVI cables that come with the gamecube and wii don't support progressive, right? Hence, 480i is the #1 viewed format for playing gamecube & wii games on the original hardware. It might not be original to the system, but it's original to the people.

Quote:let me re-word. In most situations where people cannot run dolphin due to a weak computer, they do not have a modern, dedicated graphics card but they do have a good enough processor.

Still not the case. The problem is almost always the CPU, not the GPU.

Quote:Games I've managed to play at full speed at 480p include (but are not limited to) Super Mario Sunshine, The Legend of Zelda The Wind Waker, Kirby Air Ride, and The Legend of Zelda Twilight princess. (50-55 fps for TP, close enough ) My GPU is only too slow for the average dolphin user who obviously isn't too familiar with computers.

But your GPU is too slow for Metroid Prime, which was my point. Not all games have the same hardware requirements. Besides, all of those games run at 30fps iirc. If you can run TP at 30 FPS all of the time in Hyrule Field on a completed file, I will be impressed.

Quote:I've heard something similar to this so many times, but never actually seen any testing for it. I'm sorry, but until Dolphin has an interlacing option, I'm not going to take your word that, especially considering I get random frame drops on my xbox 360 when i use 1080p over 1080i.

Here is the explanation from MaJoR:

Quote:Interlacing was a hack developed to increase FPS without additional bandwidth use on analog signals for antennas. I'm not sure it would provide any GPU speed improvements. It's not like reducing the FPS, the GPU would still have to render the whole scene every frame, but then chop it up into pieces and display only part of the scene each frame.

kidwitdaface Wrote:How do you expect me to test a feature that doesn't exist?

DIY. Fwiw, you could probably add interlacing as a Cg shader. You wouldn't even need to recompile Dolphin, just edit a text file, so long as you know what you're doing. There's a reason why such a feature doesn't exist though (hint: it's essentially useless in Dolphin). Dolphin still has to process what those frames will look like, even if you only draw every odd or even line. You'd only be reducing whatever GPU power you need to do the actual drawing, as opposed to the GPU power needed to render the scene. In other words, what MaJoR said. This would be very similar to the way Dolphin implements frameskipping; it does next to nothing to raise performance, but does affect GPU loads slightly.

Axxer Wrote:Still not the case. The problem is almost always the CPU, not the GPU.

Having been around these forums longer than either Axxer or the OP, I can say that Axxer's correct. The CPU is most often the underpowered component users come to us with. Most of the users with weak GPUs (IGPs mostly) likewise have very weak processors.

kidwitdaface Wrote:Games I've managed to play at full speed at 480p include (but are not limited to) Super Mario Sunshine, The Legend of Zelda The Wind Waker, Kirby Air Ride, and The Legend of Zelda Twilight princess. (50-55 fps for TP, close enough ) My GPU is only too slow for the average dolphin user who obviously isn't too familiar with computers.

When we say that your GPU is too weak for 1x IR, we are not saying that playing at that resolution is impossible, nor would be unenjoyable (my laptop's Intel GMA X3100 is incredibly weak, but it can run TimeSplitters 2 fairly, 35~60 depending on what's happening). What we mean is that it will bottleneck your performance because it doesn't have enough processing power to consistently handle the requirements of 1x IR for most games. As Axxer said, some games aren't graphically intensive at all, so 1x IR may be possible. Trying other games, you'll see that your GPU will hold you back.

kidwitdaface Wrote:I'm sorry, but until Dolphin has an interlacing option, I'm not going to take your word that, especially considering I get random frame drops on my xbox 360 when i use 1080p over 1080i.

What does does the 360's random frame drops between progressive and interlaced have to do Dolphin's 1x IR's looking exactly like the GC/Wii's 480p output?

Quote:DIY. Fwiw, you could probably add interlacing as a Cg shader. You wouldn't even need to recompile Dolphin, just edit a text file, so long as you know what you're doing. There's a reason why such a feature doesn't exist though (hint: it's essentially useless in Dolphin). Dolphin still has to process what those frames will look like, even if you only draw every odd or even line. You'd only be reducing whatever GPU power you need to do the actual drawing, as opposed to the GPU power needed to render the scene. In other words, what MaJoR said. This would be very similar to the way Dolphin implements frameskipping; it does next to nothing to raise performance, but does affect GPU loads slightly.

Alright, now I understand better. I appreciate the explanation.

Quote:Having been around these forums longer than either Axxer or the OP, I can say that Axxer's correct. The CPU is most often the underpowered component users come to us with. Most of the users with weak GPUs (IGPs mostly) likewise have very weak processors.

It appears i'm wrong on this, too. In my experience (which obviously isn't much) the opposite is true.

Quote:When we say that your GPU is too weak for 1x IR, we are not saying that playing at that resolution is impossible, nor would be unenjoyable (my laptop's Intel GMA X3100 is incredibly weak, but it can run TimeSplitters 2 fairly, 35~60 depending on what's happening). What we mean is that it will bottleneck your performance because it doesn't have enough processing power to consistently handle the requirements of 1x IR for most games. As Axxer said, some games aren't graphically intensive at all, so 1x IR may be possible. Trying other games, you'll see that your GPU will hold you back.

The way the others were explaining it made it seem to me as if I were wasting my time with dolphin, I thank you again for another easy to understand clear-up.

Quote:What does does the 360's random frame drops between progressive and interlaced have to do Dolphin's 1x IR's looking exactly like the GC/Wii's 480p output?

Axxer said interlacing wouldn't help as much as the IR. The point I was trying to come across was that if the xbox's frame drops that come at 1080p when the most graphic-hungry effects come into place are completely gone when i swap to 1080i, maybe some type of noticeable difference would appear in the performance of dolphin from 480p to 480i. I wasn't trying to go against axxer in saying that the IR would help more than interlacing, I simply meant that two things that can give a speed up are better than one.

Quote:DIY. Fwiw, you could probably add interlacing as a Cg shader. You wouldn't even need to recompile Dolphin, just edit a text file, so long as you know what you're doing. There's a reason why such a feature doesn't exist though (hint: it's essentially useless in Dolphin).

If I knew how to do that, I wouldn't be posting on the forums unless I did do it & found it to be successful to my goal. And yes, essentially useless to everybody except for the small amount of individuals who want to play exactly as they used to. But they're just people, I mean who cares about them.

What very few people in this thread seem to understand (especially the OP) is that there is a difference between rendering in an interlaced/progressive manner and displaying in an interlaced/progressive way (MaJoR did mention this but didn't really elaborate on it so I'm going to do that here).

A little brush up on history:
Almost all 3D video game consoles and PCs in history render progressively because if you think about what rendering does it wouldn't really make sense to try and do it in an interlaced way. For a long time they were forced to output video using an interlaced signal by either scanning the even lines of the framebuffer on one refresh and the odd lines on the next refresh (thus turning 30 frames per second progressive into 60 fields per second interlaced) or by scaning the even or odd lines of each frame and ignoring the other half of the information (thus turning 60 frames per second progressive into 60 fields per second interlaced). We did this because our displays were interlaced and therefore only accepted interlaced signals as input, so even though rendering was progressive we had no choice but to output an interlaced signal. As progressive displays and progressive signal/cable standards became more common over time on their respective platforms PCs and video game consoles incorporated video subsystem hardware that supported progressive output to improve quality.

As far as I know the GC/Wii are no different. The code in dolphin seems to suggest that and it makes sense. GC/Wii games render whole frames. They can then choose to output a progressive or interlaced signal by having the VID/F scan out the xfb contents different ways.

We DO support both progressive scan and interlaced scan:

Quote:Q: How do I activate Progressive Scan mode for Gamecube/Wii?

A1: For Gamecube, hold down "B" button while booting and if the game supports Progressive Scan, it will ask you to use it or not.

A2: For Wii, just make sure "Config -> Wii -> Enable Progressive Scan" is checked.

If you want interlaced scan just do the opposite of what that quote above says. It doesn't make a difference as far as rendering is concerned and therefore won't impact performance. All these options do is tell the game if it's rendering in progressive or interlaced mode. You still can't output an interlaced signal without interlaced hardware. Your graphics card, drivers, OS, cable, and display all have to support it and be set up for it.

kidwitdaface Wrote:And yes, essentially useless to everybody except for the small amount of individuals who want to play exactly as they used to. But they're just people, I mean who cares about them.

You need to check your attitude at the door next time. Your question was answered correctly several times by different people and each time you ignored the person completely and continued insisting that there must be a way to improve performance by using interlaced scan output even when everyone was telling you otherwise.

If you really want an accurate output use 1x IR and xfb and hook up your graphics card to your CRT display using composite.

Also it makes no sense that your xbox360 would be getting different framerates in 1080i and 1080p mode because nearly every xbox360 game ever made renders at resolutions between 600p to 720p internally and then scales that to the output resolution and format using a VID. That only thing that would be different would be the scaling.

(09-14-2012, 09:31 AM)kidwitdaface Wrote: [ -> ]will 480i help games run quicker?

Dolphin already skips displaying every second frame altogether if accurate VBeam is disabled, it won't get any faster than that with accurate 480i emulation either.

Fwiw, it's fairly easy to implement correct interlacing support and I actually had code lying around which did just that but I never bothered to make anything "real" out of it because our shader handling in opengl just sucks and I don't want to add yet another d3d-specific feature. It basically boils down to the suggested Cg shader and forcing accurate VBeam emulation to be enabled. Note that our postprocessing shader framework itself is not directly suitable for this task though since it has no way to tell the difference between upper and lower fields.

Quote:We DO support both progressive scan and interlaced scan:

Apparently not to the extent you think you do.



You see this feature? I seem to find it quite funny Jabo has implemented this in a NES emulator where it's 10 times useless, and yet nothing similar has been done to dolphin. The only explanation I have is that Jabo is better programmer than all of you, as he didn't need a forum thread of controversy. Learn something from him, he knows what people like to see in emulators. Another thing to note: when I change to progressive scan in dolphin, no visual changes. When I change from composite to s-video in nes , I notice much less jaggies. I don't feel like going back to check but to whoever said it wont make much of a difference visually is wrong, look up composite - component - s-video comparisons on youtube.
I believe the interlaced to progressive would be easier to understand in dolphin if it was set up like it is in jnes, and when you mouse over the option it should say 480i for composite & 480p for component, etc. If the ladder feature was true, I wouldn't be wasting everyone's time with this thread.

Quote:You need to check your attitude at the door next time. Your question was answered correctly several times by different people and each time you ignored the person completely and continued insisting that there must be a way to improve performance by using interlaced scan output even when everyone was telling you otherwise.

I find it interesting how you took my 2nd argumentative point of the retro aspect I left my first one for, and still ripped on me for the 1st one of performance. Seems a little counter-productive to me. And if you take note, the title of this thread is 480i compatibility, not 480i performance.

Quote:DIY. Fwiw, you could probably add interlacing as a Cg shader. You wouldn't even need to recompile Dolphin, just edit a text file, so long as you know what you're doing. There's a reason why such a feature doesn't exist though (hint: it's essentially useless in Dolphin). Dolphin still has to process what those frames will look like, even if you only draw every odd or even line. You'd only be reducing whatever GPU power you need to do the actual drawing, as opposed to the GPU power needed to render the scene. In other words, what MaJoR said. This would be very similar to the way Dolphin implements frameskipping; it does next to nothing to raise performance, but does affect GPU loads slightly.

This is what was said to me before my last reply, the one you answered to. Apparently you didn't see answer:

Quote:Alright, now I understand better. I appreciate the explanation.

And before you tell me to check my attitude, notice this other quote, also from the post you responded to:

Quote:The way the others were explaining it made it seem to me as if I were wasting my time with dolphin, I thank you again for another easy to understand clear-up.

With all due respect, if this is view I got from the terrible explanations in this thread, I believe I have every right to show my dissatisfaction. And before you go against me on this as well, here is a quote from you yourself supporting my terrible explanations claim:

Quote:What very few people in this thread seem to understand (especially the OP) is that there is a difference between rendering in an interlaced/progressive manner and displaying in an interlaced/progressive way (MaJoR did mention this but didn't really elaborate on it so I'm going to do that here).

Even though you came off rude, I have to say your explanations were quite nice and I am thankful for them.

(09-19-2012, 10:33 AM)kidwitdaface Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:We DO support both progressive scan and interlaced scan:

Apparently not to the extent you think you do.

You're comparing a NES to a GC/Wii why?

*cracks fingers*

kidwitdaface Wrote:Apparently not to the extent you think you do.

Did you read my post? Did the entire discussion about rendering vs. displaying not sink in? Did you skip over the part where I told you what the option does and why it won't make a difference? Why are you even bringing this up when I already explained it to you in detail?

kidwitdaface Wrote:

You see this feature?

Yes I see it. It's a post-processing shader designed to mimic the appearance of s-video and has nothing to do with interlaced scan. Check your video signal if you don't believe me.

kidwitdaface Wrote:I seem to find it quite funny Jabo has implemented this in a NES emulator where it's 10 times useless, and yet nothing similar has been done to dolphin.

2D consoles and 3D consoles treat interlaced rendering very differently. Maybe you should go back and reread my post since I mentioned that.

kidwitdaface Wrote:The only explanation I have is that Jabo is better programmer than all of you, as he didn't need a forum thread of controversy. Learn something from him, he knows what people like to see in emulators.

This is an open source project. Anyone can contribute improvements so long as they don't screw up the code. If something hasn't been implemented yet it's because nobody cares. If you want Jabo to do this so badly why don't you go ask him to do it. Or better yet learn to program and do it yourself. We would love to see someone contribute a patch for this. In the meantime please stop insulting the developers programming abilities, you have absolutely no grounds for saying such things.

kidwitdaface Wrote:Another thing to note: when I change to progressive scan in dolphin, no visual changes.

Which I said would happen.

kidwitdaface Wrote:When I change from composite to s-video in nes , I notice much less jaggies.

Because it's a post-processing shader that imitates the look of s-video, including the blur.

kidwitdaface Wrote:I don't feel like going back to check but to whoever said it wont make much of a difference visually is wrong, look up composite - component - s-video comparisons on youtube.

Those are cables and electrical standards. They have nothing to do with what we're talking about.

kidwitdaface Wrote:I believe the interlaced to progressive would be easier to understand in dolphin if it was set up like it is in jnes, and when you mouse over the option it should say 480i for composite & 480p for component, etc.

So let me get this straight. What you ACTUALLY want is for someone to make a post-processing shader that mimics the look of composite, s-video, and component on a progressive signal. Even though that has nothing to do with interlaced signals.

kidwitdaface Wrote:I find it interesting how you took my 2nd argumentative point of the retro aspect I left my first one for, and still ripped on me for the 1st one of performance. Seems a little counter-productive to me. And if you take note, the title of this thread is 480i compatibility, not 480i performance.

What?

What was your second argument? What was your first argument? What is the retro aspect?

The title of the thread may be 480i compatibility but you spent the entire first page responding to everyone by talking about why 480i would improve performance and claiming that they were ignoring this issue when they weren't. Therefore I felt the need to address it. I also addressed the issue of 480i compatibility in my post as well, in great detail I might add.