Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

First time it's been mentioned in the thread. I have no idea where that came from.

MaJoR, MaJoR, MaJoR...

Shonumi told the OP to use OpenGL since it´s at par with D3D in speed (assuming that the hack I mentioned is activated).

And then Shonumi told him that the speed enhacement occurs in NVidia and AMD GPUs, but it has not been tested much in the Intel GPUs.

After that I offered to test it (the Vertex Streaming Hack) in a desktop that has an Intel GPU and tell him the results.

Well, OpenGL was on par with D3D even before the Vertex Streaming Hack on some hardware (notably Nvidia hardware with Linux vs. Windows). JMC47 did some recent tests and found that OpenGL still outperforms D3D9 (now removed of course) on Nvidia hardware (with and without the Vertex Streaming Hack) and on AMD hardware iirc. OpenGL has generally been getting faster, even after the hack was added and the GLSL branch was merged.

Fwiw, I have an Intel HD 3000 on my desktop right here, but I don't think Slackware 13.37 has the appropriate build of Mesa for its drivers. I could test it out myself (installing Windows 7 + Slackware 14) but that's too much work to do in my spare time :p I appreciate the effort though, and I'm still curious if the speed difference is there in the HD 3000.

The vertex streaming hack is designed to exploit a loophole in the nvidia drivers. It is disabled for AMD video cards and has no (known) effect on Intel GPUs, so it is pretty much an nvidia only speed boost. At first AMD had pinned_memory, giving it a considerable advantage in OpenGL, but that had issues with random polygons.

DJBarry004 Wrote:Shonumi told the OP to use OpenGL since it´s at par with D3D in speed (assuming that the hack I mentioned is activated).

He did not mention the vertex streaming hack. Here's what he said.

Shonumi Wrote:OpenGL is usually on par with the D3D9 backend (which is now removed in recent revisions) in terms of speed. I don't know if the difference has been thoroughly tested on Intel IGPs (it has on Nvidia and AMD at least) but at the very least, you shouldn't get these OS X specific driver issues, regardless if you use D3D9/11 or OpenGL on Windows 7.

Okay, thanks for all the clarifications everyone who posted. I guess I'll either use bootcamp or just stick to lower revisions. Am I correct in assuming that the version Shonumi recommended is the best one (I guess) for my current situation?

Thank you everyone.

3.5-663 is probably the best build for you, yeah. Plain 3.5 is fine too. I'd recommend dual-booting Windows or Linux if you care enough about Dolphin performance, though.

So, I wonder if OS X Mavericks with updated video drivers changes anything?

(10-24-2013, 05:13 PM)Verix Wrote: [ -> ]So, I wonder if OS X Mavericks with updated video drivers changes anything?

Nope. Although I have yet to update my macbook, pauldacheez mentioned;

(10-19-2013, 11:59 AM)pauldacheez Wrote: [ -> ]Sorry I'm late, but yes, this is a driver issue, specific to the HD 3000 on recent versions of OS X. It isn't fixed in Mavericks, and it also extends way past just graphical issues – on certain games it'll go so far as to crash the system UI.

Dolphin 4.0 works perfectly fine with the Linux/Windows HD 3000 drivers, and it actually ends up performing quite a bit better (?!) as well.

I've been running Mavericks betas for as long as they've been available and they've done absolutely fuck all about these specific issues. I really need to file a radar on this, they clearly aren't aware of it.

I juuust finished upgrading mine to stock mavericks GM. aaaaaand it crashes instantly with any game.. hahaha