Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

64 bit CrunchBang Linux
Dolphin 3.5-1580, built per http://code.google.com/p/dolphin-emu/wiki/Linux_Build
Intel® Core™ i7-3610QM Processor
AMD Radeon™ HD 7670M
6GB DDR3 1600MHz memory

Games (Both Mario Sunshine and Pokemon Colosseum) will start, but ONLY solid colors are being shown, almost like just the background of the frame. They transition smoothly and there are sounds as well. I can also move through menus (blindly) with my keyboard.
Here's all I see (Sunshine)


If anyone knows how to get this going I would greatly appreciate it. Sitting here listening to Mario snore with a solid green screen, he wants this fixed too.

EDIT: Just tried Paper Mario:TTYD, It's a constant black screen, but has sound + controls.

Try the proprietary AMD drivers, and make sure Dolphin's using the AMD card.

How do I 'make sure Dolphin's using the AMD card'?

Try raising the internal resolution to 2x or higher. The Intel IGP will bottleneck your performance at higher resolutions. If you get a slowdown, it means you're still using your Intel IGP.

At 4x it dropped down to 50%, so how do I make it use the AMD card?

It sounds like it already is. The Intel IGP would begin to choke performance around 2x IR (which is a generous estimate, it's really around 1x IR for a lot of games). 3x IR sounds right for the limit of the HD 7670, so anything higher bottlenecks it.

EDIT: I should have said that you should raise the IR in increments, one-by-one, and then test your performance.

I did go one by one, and didn't notice anything until I hit the 4x. Is my only option left to try the proprietary drivers or is there a few things I can try beforehand that might fix this?

If you did it incrementally and the drop didn't occur until 4x, it's definitely using the HD 7670 then. I would second pauldacheez's suggestion and use proprietary drivers; those drivers are usually the best in terms of quality.

The only other thing I can think of that's causing problems would be your window manager. Have you tried any other games that extensively use OpenGL (Neverball, SuperTux Kart, Xonotic, etc)? If so, do you have similar problems?

Supertuxkart runs just fine.

The issue is that the open-source HD 7xxx drivers are still woefully incomplete, and they likely still don't perfectly support OpenGL 3 features, though support improves steadily over time. SuperTuxKart and stuff like that almost undoubtedly still use GL ≤2.1 features at most, so of course those run fine. Even if the open-source drivers were working properly, you'd get drastically better performance with the proprietary drivers anyway, if Phoronix benchmarks are any indication.