Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

@ Reaver83: With those BIOS tweaks, you just turned your inefficient Phenom II X6 CPU into a slightly more efficient Phenom II X4

- The first version of AMD Turbo Core that was added to X6 (Thuban) CPUs was a gimmick that didn't work properly. Disabling that crap actually improves performance in many situations.
- The 6MB L3 cache in Phenom II CPUs is exclusive. In X4 models, each core gets 1.5 MB of L3 cache. In X6 CPUs, you have only 1 MB per core. X4 CPUs have slightly better single threaded performance because of this.

About your other tweaks:
* Setting the affinity to Core0 and Core1 is a BAD idea. You *lose* performance by doing this.
* Setting the priority to "High" is also a bad idea. "Above Normal" is recommended if you're running a modern Windows OS (Win 7, 8.1, 10). "High" priority does more harm than good.
* About the CPU clock speed: You don't need more than 3.5 GHz if you're using the latest development build or the latest unstable version of Ishiiruka. Drop the CPU speed down to 3.5 GHz and set the voltage back to default. Less heat, less noise and *much* lower power consumption (because Cool'N'Quiet doesn't work properly when overclocked).
* Why use insane AA settings when you can bump up the IR (to 4x, for example) and use a lower AA setting like 2xAA or Ishiiruka's downsampling filter? It looks so much better that way.
* Per-Pixel Lighting: You may want to turn that off to reduce stuttering.
* Try the latest Ishiiruka build and *enable* Fast EFB Access. Now turn on CPU->EFB Access as well. You can finally experience those (CPU-intensive) EFB effects without performance loss.

(02-18-2016, 08:37 AM)Hyllian Wrote: [ -> ]Thanks, I need to test more options from there then. Anyway, here's a second shader for Ishiiruka: crt-hyllian.glsl. For now, it needs to be put inside 'Scaling' folder as I don't know yet how to scale properly from the PosProcessing folder. And to see the crt effect, you need at least a 1080p display.

Tino could you merge CRT-Hylian and Super xBR shaders to Ishiiruka's repository? I think it's better than leaving them in forum where barely anyone will find them.

(02-21-2016, 12:26 PM)kirbypuff Wrote: [ -> ]@ Reaver83: With those BIOS tweaks, you just turned your inefficient Phenom II X6 CPU into a slightly more efficient Phenom II X4

- The first version of AMD Turbo Core that was added to X6 (Thuban) CPUs was a gimmick that didn't work properly. Disabling that crap actually improves performance in many situations.
- The 6MB L3 cache in Phenom II CPUs is exclusive. In X4 models, each core gets 1.5 MB of L3 cache. In X6 CPUs, you have only 1 MB per core. X4 CPUs have slightly better single threaded performance because of this.

About your other tweaks:
* Setting the affinity to Core0 and Core1 is a BAD idea. You *lose* performance by doing this.
* Setting the priority to "High" is also a bad idea. "Above Normal" is recommended if you're running a modern Windows OS (Win 7, 8.1, 10). "High" priority does more harm than good.
* About the CPU clock speed: You don't need more than 3.5 GHz if you're using the latest development build or the latest unstable version of Ishiiruka. Drop the CPU speed down to 3.5 GHz and set the voltage back to default. Less heat, less noise and *much* lower power consumption (because Cool'N'Quiet doesn't work properly when overclocked).
* Why use insane AA settings when you can bump up the IR (to 4x, for example) and use a lower AA setting like 2xAA or Ishiiruka's downsampling filter? It looks so much better that way.
* Per-Pixel Lighting: You may want to turn that off to reduce stuttering.
* Try the latest Ishiiruka build and *enable* Fast EFB Access. Now turn on CPU->EFB Access as well. You can finally experience those (CPU-intensive) EFB effects without performance loss.

With the latest version, you don't even need fast efb access, peek cache make it run almost at the same speed of fast efb access

(02-21-2016, 01:07 PM)Tino Wrote: [ -> ]With the latest version, you don't even need fast efb access, peek cache make it run almost at the same speed of fast efb access

That's only partially true, because 'Fast EFB Access' speeds up POKES as well.
EFB pokes are more demanding than peeks (even more so with EFB2RAM).

(02-21-2016, 10:56 AM)Tino Wrote: [ -> ]Updated the latest folder with a new version, added efb peek cache to dx11 courrtesy of @stenzek , por it to dx9 and dx12. games that do eavy efb access should work a lot better now.
replaced scaling with a shader and remove the options for the backend that does ot need it. testing is welcome. Enjoy.

Awesome, thanks! RG_SSAA is working great.

After a bunch of research and mucking around I think I figured out why the jinc2-sharper and corresponding lanczos2-sharper filters aren't performing the downsampling that I'm expecting.
I wanted something like GeDoSaTo's lanczos scaler, which as it turns out uses a different algorithm (4 taps instead of 2). The code for the lanczos4 shader is from libretro: https://github.com/libretro/common-shaders/blob/master/windowed/shaders/lanczos4.cg.
I know programming but don't know anything about graphics; how difficult would it be to implement libretro's lanczos4 shader as an Ishiiruka scaling filter?

Apologies to Hyllian; your shader works great for upscaling as I've discovered.

I haven't managed to figure out how to reproduce it, but randomly I find out some parts of shaders get broken (or locked) and no settings will change them.

I first experienced this many releases ago while playing around with AA settings (trying to force SGSSAA, and comparing it to built in AA options) and when playing with shaders AND AA.
What happens is some shaders stop accepting changes, so when you make changes it looks like nothing changes... until you restart Ishiiruka.

Since Hyllian's scaling shader was added, I've been very satisfied how it works when combined with 2xSGSSAA being forced via Nvidia Inspector (takes care of the overly strong blur from not being natively supported in Dolphin's rendering structure). This shader also has an options window (Graphics settings>Post-processing tab> "display shader options" button).
I've been using this option window as a way to tell when shaders get screwed up and I need to restart the game. When this happens, you see nothing in the window that opens (no Anti-Ringing slider, no tab for said slider, no textbox for description--just a small and empty window). I'll try to take a screenshot when it happens to me again.

And like I said, I've not been able to reproduce this on demand. I always end up noticing it after making a bunch of small changes at once (ex: single change in three shaders, texture scaling modes, hacks tab, wireframe on/off).

I've also noticed that the SSGI Samples option, in the SSGI shader, will only work if I'm changing the value by dragging the slider with the mouse and not the keyboard or mouse wheel. The slider itself would change, as would the value it displayed, but would not take effect unless by dragging the slider with the mouse (i.e. using arrow keys, page up/down, home/end or mouse wheel was nothing more than a visual change in the window and was not applying to the game/.ini)

And what is RG_SSAA.glsl? I know it's a scaling shader (the replacement for the now removed scaling option that used to be in the Enhancements tab), but I mean the "RG" portion of the name.
Rotated/random grid?

Well I attempted to port lanczos4 to Ishiiruka and, uh, got this:



This is at 1x IR. I don't know what I did wrong lol.
I used the libretro implementation and the GeDoSaTo implementation as references. The shader source code is here: http://pastebin.com/eQBLEZ1g

Edit: After poring over the code and doing some experiments, I've come to the conclusion that the shader code is correct, but the coordinate systems that I'm using are wrong.
In fact, if I set stepxy = GetInvTargetResolution() / 4.0, I get pretty good results out of the shader, but I don't know if it's correct per se.
What exactly do GetInvTargetResolution() and GetInvResolution() return?

@ Tino:

* How about merging PR #3454 for another speed boost?
* Lens flare effects still work in Ishiiruka v565, but are broken (again!) in dev/master. Hmmm...
* Ishiiruka v565 still has that NSMB w1-1 bug with blue-tinted blocks @ 1xIR when using the OpenGL backend.
* It would be great if those slow texture scalers are ported as shaders to be processed by the GPU.

@Hyllian:

What we need is these shaders ported to Ishiiruka:

For 2D image enhancement/upscaling
----------------------------------------
* CRT-Caligari
* CRT-Hyllian
* CRT-Lottes
* 6xBR and 6xBR-v3.7c+CRT (v3.7c looks best when combined with a CRT shader)

- More CRT shaders, because DolphinFX is bulky and *super slow*. DolphinFX Scanlines + Barrel Distortion also doesn't produce a very good CRT effect.
- 6xBR, because 5xBR is not enough for high-res displays.

For downsampling (from GeDoSaTo/madVR/MPC-HC)
--------------------------------------------------------
* Lanczos3 & Lanczos4 (with adjustable deringing fllter)
* Bicubic (with adjustable sharpness from 0 to 100)
* Catmull-Rom AR

(02-21-2016, 02:29 PM)Kamikaze_Ice Wrote: [ -> ]I haven't managed to figure out how to reproduce it, but randomly I find out some parts of shaders get broken (or locked) and no settings will change them.

What happens is some shaders stop accepting changes, so when you make changes it looks like nothing changes... until you restart Ishiiruka.

It's a really weird bug that many users can reproduce (you're not the only one). Selecting / changing shaders doesn't work every time.
Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. If you select the SAME SHADER again, it might work. You don't have to retart Ishiiruka. It usually works the 2nd or 3rd time.

Quote:What is RG_SSAA.glsl?

Rotated Grid SSAA shader (best used for downsampling from a very high IR (e.g. 6x, 12x) to your display res (usually 1080p).

(02-21-2016, 09:54 AM)Tino Wrote: [ -> ]can you give more detail on your problem because i just tested andit worked as spected on my system

I don't really know what meaningful detail I can give but basically the custom textures don't load no matter how I configure any Ishiiruka, 520, 554, 560, 565 or the stable version.

With ''Prefetch Custom Textures'' enabled and the texture packs in the right place,
I get ''Custom Textures loaded, 0.0 MB in 0.0 s''.

I also tried deleting every trace of Dolphin and only testing with a single version of Ishiiruka.

All my drivers are definitely up to date and I just did a clean install of Windows 10 a few weeks ago.