Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I need help on what video backend to use

What is your OS and Video Card?

For Windows users, DX9 generally offers the best performance, though it is less accurate than OpenGL or DX11 in some games. For other games, it may be a toss up between OpenGL or DX11 (due to DX9's aforementioned graphical issues) depending on your drivers.

For Linux and OS X, OpenGL is the only hardware accelerated backend to choose from. OpenGL on Linux (with Nvidia at least) probably runs faster than on Windows due to driver differences. OpenGL runs quite fast on my end. I can't speak for OS X, however.

On my shitty little Intel HD 3000, OpenGL is generally faster on Linux than on OS X. GLSL-master slowed it down a bit, though.

For me on Windows 8 with a GTX 660 OpenGL with Hacked buffer upload tends to be a bit faster though SSAA looks better on D3D9. Though I haven't done any real comparisons since sometime after the GLSL merge so It's possible this has changed. I'm curious now I think Ill test it when I get home.

On newer nvidia cards (400 series and up) openGL performs much better relative to d3d9/11 than on previous nvidia architectures for some reason. So I'm not surprised. It also depends on the game and settings. For example efb copy to ram has a much higher performance hit on d3d11 than d3d9.

Most games work fine with DX9. But some games require DX11 (and sometimes OpenGL) to work properly.

Were you thinking about a game in particular or was it a global question?

global question. I hate switching settings for each game I play. I wish there's a universal setting that works for every game like snes9x/xebra/fusion, basically emus that don't use a plugin system.

What games require DX11/OpenGL to work properly?

I dunno off the top of my head. Right-click a game and click Wiki before you play it to find out these things, as we have a wiki full of game-specific bugs/settings info.