Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

hdcmeta:

I wanted to say many thanks for your release of this DirectX 12 backend. It is outstanding work and greatly appreciated! Keep up the good work.

I have tested it with Metroid Prime 3. It is working with no problems so far.

As expected, shader compilation microstuttering persists, but I am very pleased to report that the stuttering is less severe than with the OpenGl and DirectX 11 backend. With these other backends the stuttering never completely went away for me even after extended playtime. However, with the Direct X 12 backend the stuttering after a minute or two was mostly resolved resulting in a smoother gameplay experience.

Decided to try this out with a game that is pretty intensive for me (Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance)

It runs MUCH BETTER...

Although... something may be wrong here

I have also been testing Super Mario Galaxy. Again, great results. No issues and the shader stutter is less pronounced, especially compared to D3D11.

EDIT: One bug encountered: in the 'Engine Room', in the 'Sea Slide Galaxy', in the second star 'Faster than a Speeding Penguin', at the start of the race I had visual glitching, followed by a blue screen only showing the HUD. The second time I attempt this level after restarting Dolphin it worked fine.

(12-24-2015, 02:48 PM)Team Fail Wrote: [ -> ]Saw a thread on this on GBAtemp and thought I'd give this a try since I am running Windows 10. It seems to be running a lot of my games much nicer, including Wii Sports and Mario Kart Wii, however, one game that actually regressed was MadWorld NTSC - The level geometry doesn't render: http://imgur.com/4FryZti

That's using Dolphin's defaults, although it seems to have taken some per-game configs from my regular build of Dolphin where I have no issues apart from lag.

Edit: In addition, Wii Music is actually playable too. It's not tempo perfect as there's still a bit of a delay, but it's running at 60FPS as opposed to 15 like regular Dolphin does...

Thanks Team Fail - I found the issue with MadWorld, and it was a subtle issue that could be causing all of the 'random' problems below. This has been fixed in v0.92, see the first post.

(12-25-2015, 09:07 PM)dephined Wrote: [ -> ]Bug report: as you can see in the first foto of the attachment, Goldeneye 007 (SJBE52) has a lighting problem with DX12 (only using copy to RAM, but the game needs that setting); DX11 (2nd foto) and OpenGL are fine.

Thanks - Do you mind seeing if this is fixed in v0.92?

(12-29-2015, 12:22 PM)Pingaz Wrote: [ -> ]Decided to try this out with a game that is pretty intensive for me (Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance)

It runs MUCH BETTER...

Although... something may be wrong here

I'm 50% sure that v0.92 should fix this :-) - can you quickly check?

(12-30-2015, 09:52 AM)Dolemub42 Wrote: [ -> ]I have also been testing Super Mario Galaxy. Again, great results. No issues and the shader stutter is less pronounced, especially compared to D3D11.

EDIT: One bug encountered: in the 'Engine Room', in the 'Sea Slide Galaxy', in the second star 'Faster than a Speeding Penguin', at the start of the race I had visual glitching, followed by a blue screen only showing the HUD. The second time I attempt this level after restarting Dolphin it worked fine.

Glad to hear it is (usually) working well, please let me know if you can reliably repro that issue. In terms of shader stutter, just remember that the D3D12 backend shares its shader cache with D3D11, so it will have a head start if you run D3D11 first, then D3D12 (or vice versa).

(12-31-2015, 06:42 AM)hdcmeta Wrote: [ -> ]Glad to hear it is (usually) working well, please let me know if you can reliably repro that issue. In terms of shader stutter, just remember that the D3D12 backend shares its shader cache with D3D11, so it will have a head start if you run D3D11 first, then D3D12 (or vice versa).

Thanks!

I should note that I was examining the amount of stuttering when the cache is initially empty in each case and generated from scratch, which is seems convincingly less in D3D12 than OpenGL or D3D11. This is very noticeable in Metroid Prime 3 which stutters a lot in D3D11, but less on initial boot in D3D12 and hardly at all after I played for a couple of minutes. I do not know if this is expected or not.

As you can see from the attachment, it's not fixed (in fact the problem got worse)

P.S. seems very strange to me that the new version (0.92) is stated as 4.0-8402, while older 0.91 is stated as newer (4.0-8408)...

So I've been messing with these builds on and off since I saw the performance increase and they seem to work really well. The gain in Mario Galaxy is especially nice.

I did notice however (and this has perhaps been mentioned previously and is a known issues) that if I have "Load Custom Textures" enabled for Super Mario Galaxy 1 or 2, the emulator crashes on load. It does however work on Zelda Wind Waker without a problem. Perhaps it's specific to only Wii titles?

I had a question about how this implementation of DX12 works as well. With DX12 you can "pool" the memory on dual GPU setups to act as one large amount. I currently have a single GTX 970, but am adding a 2nd this week and was curious if the DX12 implementation here would allow dolphin to use the total VRAM of 8GB as opposed to mirrored 4GB like in a traditional SLI setup. Not that SLI is traditionally supported in Dolphin anyways.

Thanks for your work on this version of Dolphin, it's exciting to see how it progresses.

Xenoblade works well. Shader compilation seems to take much longer than D3D11. That might just be a random occurrence though since AFAIK it uses the same compiler?

Run into a couple of problems with 0.92 today:

BOOM BLOX bash party (Wii)
Runs under DX11 but just renders a black screen on DX12 - seems to be running but not visible judging by sound.
EDIT: FIXED BLACK SCREEN PROBLEM BY MANUALLY DELETING SHADER CACHE.

Starfox Adventures (GC) Torches in caves shine through walls.

... and a happy new year everyone

(12-19-2015, 03:06 AM)neobrain Wrote: [ -> ]Hi!

It's been a while since I was last active in the forums, but well.. I feel my 2c might be appropriate here, given that I introduced the D3D11 backend originally. There have been some positive words about this change already, so I won't get into repeating those and instead move on to real talk immediately Do note that this is my personal opinion though, and the more active members of the Dolphin development team may have different understandings of code quality than I do.

tl;dr: I don't think it makes a lot of sense to introduce a D3D12 backend to Dolphin, currently. Here's a quote of mine from today's IRC explaining why:

Long story short: I'm not expecting hdcmeta to fix all of this mess, but at the same time that doesn't mean it's sensible to merge his work into Dolphin just because it has already been written. Introducing an OS specific (and even OS version specific!) backend introduces a huge maintenance overhead, which may slow down overall progress to the point where there is no net gain to be obtained. Time spent porting changes to the various backends may be better invested into general code infrastructure work.

In the end, we have to ask ourselves: Is there any actual long-term advantage to gain from introducing /yet/ another backend?

sorry, totally accept your opinion is expert but surely there's a dilemma here: if DX11/OGL could have been well-threaded/threaded-easily surely it would have been done already?

also, Win10 uptake is huge, it's not like say developing for DX11/Vista, plus i'm not just flattering you guys, me (and a whole bunch of folk i wager) would have upgraded to Win10 just for a DX12 dolphin