Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I know, I know.  It's a Mac trying to run Dolphin, albeit quite a decent one.  It's what I've got.  I can take some abuse here : ).

Zelda titles play very well.  I'm able to scale up the internal resolution to 1080p and get near-perfect frame rates basically everywhere on Twilight Princess, for instance—even in Hyrule Field. Wind Waker plays perfectly at high resolution as well. Skyward Sword seems to play fine as long as I keep the resolution around 720p.

Mario Galaxy seems heavier, and isn't able to play smoothly.  This seems a bit odd to me.  Is this a limitation of being forced into using OpenGL rather than DirectX? Advice?

Would I be a lot better off booting this machine into Windows via boot camp?  — Ive read about this here to some degree, but there isn't a ton of discussion as to the actual performance boost.

I have read the wiki on Mario Galaxy, and I have tried a fair few different settings, but I'm still only able to get around 30-45 fps most of the time — which is pretty slow.  Wiimote speaker is off.  The game looks great, it's just slow.

What should I do?  I feel like it's something silly i'm missing, but maybe it's just a much heavier game.  I do seem to get 60fps in Mario Galaxy when there aren't other creatures around.

I'm running the latest 4.0.8680, and I also found about the same performance using a recent RC of 5.0.

---- Slightly off-topic, is there any interest in Apple's new API for 'Metal' and ditching OpenGL for the Mac builds? I ask with only conceptual knowledge of what this might entail.

Mario Galaxy is a game that uses the GPU more intensely than others, so try dropping down the enhancements

(01-12-2016, 04:45 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: [ -> ]Mario Galaxy is a game that uses the GPU more intensely than others, so try dropping down the enhancements

Thank you. Yes. Even on base settings, it's not running well. It surprises me because of the performance i'm seeing in other games. The resolution settings and various enhancements seem to do very little. Is there something particular you recommend?

I'm looking into installing windows on an external thunderbolt drive. I think this hardware can do better.

Any other ideas?

Upgrade to 10.11 (El Capitan). Try on Windows via Boot Camp.

There are no plans to support Metal. One reason why not is because it takes time to add another backend. On top of that it's only usable on one platform. (you could say the same for DirectX on Windows, though there is a larger userbase on Windows than OS X). Of course, someone could come along and decide to open up a pull request one day, so you never know.

(01-12-2016, 10:07 AM)OatmealDome Wrote: [ -> ]Upgrade to 10.11 (El Capitan). Try on Windows via Boot Camp.

There are no plans to support Metal. One reason why not is because it takes time to add another backend. On top of that it's only usable on one platform. (you could say the same for DirectX on Windows, though there is a larger userbase on Windows than OS X). Of course, someone could come along and decide to open up a pull request one day, so you never know.

Thank you. Running latest Mac OS, and for the most part, Dolphin runs swimmingly. Have not tried it via boot camp yet. Boot camp jacks around with my internal drive, so i'd need to finesse it into running from a thunderbolt external, which is doesn't do by default, but can be coerced into doing.

Metal claims pretty substantial increases in performance.

If I get a big increase with boot camp and windows, i'll report back. I'm sure others on here wouldn't mind knowing about the direct comparison.

Metal support requires someone willing to maintain it.  Now Apple has done a great deal to try and make metal reasonably compatible with existing OpenGL projects, but dolphin's nuance and tendency to break things would most likely make the process difficult.  Frankly the performance problems are definitely OSX related.  Running Windows in boot camp should easily yield better performance.  Sad but true.

Ok. Reporting back! Loaded a legit copy of windows 10 today via Boot Camp, and YES. Much better performance. To anyone wondering if they should try a windows install for their Mac to see the real performance of the Dolphin emulator, stop wondering—load boot camp. Skyward Sword can now be played at 1080p with only the occasional hitch that's barely noticeable—Mario Galaxy was still slowing down on occasion, but the settings for resolution were up pretty high—and it would recover—

odd slowdowns too, like right before I would enter a building, like a pre-fetch operation was slowing it. More oddly was that if I just stood still it would not recover full frame rate, but if i went ahead into the building it would jump back up to full speed. Will I run Windows all the time? Nope. But I will for Dolphin.

One other interesting thing. I noticed that the default backend on Windows is also OpenGL. I did not have time to test both while booted there — real work to do besides play games after all. Is there a reason it defaults to OpenGL? Is the better option a per-game choice?

OpenGL tends to be slightly faster in most cases than DirectX, especially on Nvidia hardware. On AMD, DirectX is sometimes faster.