D3D9 is more convenient for ATI users. Dolphin's OGL doesn't support some setting (I think triple buffering) and is naturally slower than D3D9. Supporting new fangled stuff like my 7660D should be a bit more desirable than some old nVidia card that's hardly sufficient for Dolphin. Could I just turn off triple buffering? I guess so, if it would even work. That's pretty annoying for one program when it's the only one that has this problem.
Also, since a few updates back, this build is now substantially faster. Like +10FPS easily.
In the end, those reasons are pretty closely related to XP support. I can't just move away from old OS when an upgrade path isn't available. I have way too many customized settings and such. It's not practical.
On my Radeon 5850, latest builds OpenGL are much, much faster thanks to Radeons kicking ass at integers.
JMC47: talking seriously, everyone can optimize code when all the features needed are supported, is just that I'm and old school programmer that enjoys doing what everyone else consider impossible.
If you take a look at my latest changes you will see that every optimization I did are directly portable to master, I’m just waiting to stabilize the code.
The challenge of making D3D9 work is a cool enough thing to do. Don't think I'm insulting you, I'm not; I just want to see the best outcome for everyone.
That is my goal to, you have to remember that I’m in dolphin team since the time where opengl and dx9 barely have a visible output, no one is happier than me when I hear people saying how great dolphin has become.
Thanks for the explanation, Tino. The post announcing the deprecation of D3D9 in the official branch made it sound like it didn't have any advantages anymore compared to OGL and D3D11, so I was curious what else it might offer (besides speed and XP support).
D3D9 is particularly light on the CPU thread, that's it's biggest advantage. When it comes to actually emulating the GC/Wii, D3D11 and OpenGL are just better equipped at this point. This was not true for a very, very long time through Dolphin's development, D3D11 didn't even exist for a while.
Thank you so much, this build works great on my rig!!
Can you merge the Zelda ucode HLE fixes??
Please!! :p
I'm actually glad he hasn't, yet. Like this I can play SMG which is fullspeed most of the time but in some places it gets a little slow which doesn't bother me much because the sound is still nice. With Zelda ucode stuff merged it would be painful for my ears ^^
Actually, most people who have such fast PCs that they don't have any issues with the new audio system won't be using this DX9-build, anyway, I guess.
If this were "have a wish" I'd say it'd be great to (once DX9 is really at a 'final' status) have one build with old audio system and one build with the new one.
EDIT: @ Tino: gfx issues in SMG are gone now
Chris's model overlap foreground elements again, although Texture Cache Acc. is put to "safe". This doesnt happen in older builds with 3D9 like 3.0-750.
http://abload.de/img/dx9bugyguey.png