Since the Nvidia kit is incompatible with the GPL, why not ship a separate EXE that is run by dolphin, whose sole job is to turn on performance mode? Maybe release it under the MIT license instead, so it can be legally linked? Or am I missing a significant problem with that approach?
Just because it's legal to link (a,b) and (b,c) doesn't mean it's legal be link (a,b,c). For legal linking, all parts must be relicensed at one target license. So all linked parts must share one possible relicense target to link them together.
But it would be possible to open another exe while dolphin is opened, but it would be os dependent. Patches are welcome :-)
IMHO it might be a better idea to reverse engineer the interface. NVIDIA might not like that, but who cares.
If someone provides me with a simple .exe that does only the performance mode setting thing, I'm sure I could spare a few hours to procmon the shit out of it.
What is this issue I've been hearing lately?. Some NV cards are not switching to high performance mode, or such?. I just have an NVidia profile set up for console emulators, with the various emu binaries added, and have the performance mode set to high performance, along with whatever other varying settings I use for each emu, and it works fine.
Unless this is another unrelated issue?
The issue is that Dolphin doesn't put the driver into high-perf mode automatically, which would be possible easily if we were able to link against the NV SDK.
I thought it was possible to manually do so? Unless it's something else? I have my graphics card setting set to manually do so for other games and stuff on my laptop which has a NVidia card, it really isn't that hard. It doesn't necessarily warrant a new exe, you can just tell people to put it in their options.
Yes, it is possible to manually do so, but that's not the same as Dolphin doing that automatically for you, which would be more convenient.
The problem with setting Dolphin to performance mode is that when I have Dolphin open but not running anything, my GPU still runs at full speed. One day my computer wouldn't sleep and the room with my PC was really hot when I came in. That's when I turned off performance mode.
Create an NVidia profile for Dolphin. Which will only run in performance mode...when you're running dolphin, ofc.
edit: I don't ever use the global driver setting. I always create profiles for each application, where applicable.
Still, the driver doesn't care if Dolphin's running a game, paused, or just idling in the menu. The problem is that the PC produces a LOT of unnecessary heat because Dolphin's open but not running a game, but the driver revs up the GPU to full speed.