Hello Fellow Tech Enthusiasts,
I am going to acquire a Nvidia Shield in a few days. I understand that this emulator is not optimized for Tegra 4. I understand the developer is very busy and also does not money to buy a Shield out of pocket. So what I'm suggesting is that he start a crowdfunding project to get a Shield/ Tegra 4 Device. What you guys need to do is speak up and let him know you would be willing to donate! I know I would so that makes one!
I've actually got an Nvidia Shield at this point.
Sonicadvance1 implemented support for the thing a month or two ago, but removed it recently because the thing's GPU doesn't support everything Dolphin requires and never really displayed proper graphics.
Dolphin needs OpenGL ES3. In fact, OpenGL ES2 + lots of extensions would also be fine, but it's much easier to say which ES3 feature we don't use than which ES2 extension would also be needed...
ES3 is backward compatible with ES2 doesn't mean there only some little differences. ES3 pulls in almost all changes from desktop GL3.3 (but geometry shaders). Just look at all this small changes in GLSL130 - it's a almost a new language... On desktop GL, we've also dropped all glsl versions before 130 (eg checkout intel ironlake support) as there are too many small pitfalls. So even if you manage to run dolphin fine on gles2+every extensions, I bet my next ogl change will break it again as nobody but tegra4 will ever be able to test this :-(
It sucks big time to see Nvidia doing something like this...
I took a look at the specification paper for Tegra4 and found this (priceless):
"As stated earlier, we believe differences in image quality between FP32 and FP20 pixel
rendering are virtually unperceivable to the human eye, and the power savings is substantial to
warrant using FP20 in this generation SoC. Similarly, the Tegra 4 processor includes popular
texture compression formats such as DXT.
We do not expect applications/games to use ES 3.0
for quite some time."
From:
http://www.nvidia.com/docs/IO/116757/Tegra_4_GPU_Whitepaper_FINALv2.pdf
Oh well, considering the fast development of mobile platforms in a few months I'll have a nice paper weight
It's true. Nobody expects applications to use OpenGL ES 3. There still aren't any applications beside Dolphin and benchmarks that use it. That I know of anyway. I wouldn't call it a complete paperweight either. It still works well for other emulators, just not Dolphin
Other than Asphalt 8, I didn't found no other game that support OpenGL ES 3.0.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/gamelofts-upcoming-asphalt-8-airborne-optimized-for-new-google-nexus-7-216786731.html
I agree that it's not going to be a complete paperweight, but it's just sad to see that Nvidia took this path, that, to me, seems to be the silliest way of "ignoring" a promising market standard.
If we think that the OES 3.0 capabilities were unlocked in with Android 4.3, then we understand that already some of the manufactures prepared themselves, allowing their devices to nowadays comply with this new API.
Just sayin
(12-05-2013, 02:15 PM)pauldacheez Wrote: [ -> ]Sonicadvance1 implemented support for the thing a month or two ago, but removed it recently because the thing's GPU doesn't support everything Dolphin requires and never really displayed proper graphics.
They should put it back in!
Really though, does the GPU need to support everything? Is there no way it (or other non-ES3 devices) couldn't run a reduced version?
If you're willing to find a capable developer and pay him full-time to maintain such a reduced version, then yes.
Otherwise, no.