Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hey all,

So I read on this forum that using OpenGL with Vertex Streaming Hack could give even better performance than using DX11 or DX9 if you're using a nVidia GPU. I wanted to check this out but I haven't noticed any improvement of OpenGL after enabling this hack. OpenGL is still around 15 FPS slower in my games (SMG and Donkey Kong Country Returns) compared to DX11 and 9. I have enabled Copy EFB to Texture, Idle Skipping and Dual Core. My OpenGL settings is shown below. Is there something I'm missing here?

My specs:
Windows 8 Pro 64bit and using Dolphin 4.0.1
i5-3570K not overclocked
GTX 660Ti 2GB
8GB RAM and 1 TB HDD

Disable antialiasing and use the same settings for all backends then try again.

yeah, there's a chance the ridiculous AA and AF are causing you to be GPU limited. I'm one of the people who get the huge speed boosts in OpenGL, and I can definitely confirm Mario Galaxy and Galaxy 2 are much better, especially in busier levels.

Ok, so I disabled AA and put AF to 1x for OpenGL but there's still no improvement at all. Even DX9 with AF 16x is faster. I have the same settings for all backends. I'm not getting this...

JMC47: Is your OpenGL backend also faster than DX9 in SMG1 and 2? I noticed that DX9 is the fastest for me in these games.

OpenGL is about 20% faster in Galaxy 1 and Galaxy 2 most of the time, and almost twice as fast in Galaxy 2 during the final world. One of the graphical effects absolutely wreck D3D9 and D3D11 but don't bother OpenGL at all.

For performance AF doesn't matter at all, but MSAA increases the gpu load a lot. As D3D9 doesn't support MSAA, it should be disabled for accurate testings.

For Super Mario Galaxy, one hard feature for OpenGL still is "EFB access", but it shouldn't be disabled as you can't shoot stars without it.

Johnny: You could try to set your gpu in performance mode. This could be done somewhere in the driver. The GPU shall be much loughter in this way. In this mode, the driver will try to decrease the rendering latency which itself speed up the efb access.

degasus: I just set my gpu in performance mode (in the nVidia Control Panel) and tried the game again, but alas no performance gain at all (still around 10 FPS lower than DX9, even with Vertex Streaming Hack).

I find it quite strange seeing a lot of nVidia users having better performance with OpenGL than with DX9 while I have the exact opposite.