Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

With Samsung set to unveil the Galaxy S9 tomorrow, I thought it would be fun to speculate on the possible performance improvement of the new chipset.  As usual, it will come in two flavors.  One with the SD 845 and the other with Samsung's own Exynos 9810.  One big surprise this year is Samsung's chip could be much faster than Qualcomm's.  In fact, if leaked geekbench scores are accurate(look at that single core score!), it's performance could be close to that of Apple's A11.

Now, I realize ARM's gpu drivers have been pretty poor lately but, it's exciting to think about how the chipset could potentially play a decent number of games at full speed.  I'm crossing my fingers and toes hoping that ARM has fixed at least some of the driver bugs.


source: http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s9_exynos_9810_geekbench-news-29594.php

Mali is still slow. Don't get your hopes up. We also don't know about thermals but Samsung is typically better about that than most Snapdragon SoCs in the same class.

(02-25-2018, 11:46 AM)Helios Wrote: [ -> ]Mali is still slow. Don't get your hopes up. We also don't know about thermals but Samsung is typically better about that than most Snapdragon SoCs in the same class.

There's a pretty good chance the mali hardware has plenty of power - it's just hamstrung by the drivers completely failing at what dolphin is trying to do....

But to the end user there's probably not much of a difference - unless this happens to release with much revised drivers, "big" driver updates rarely get pushed to devices post-release. Even if they do end up fixing the issues.

Their CPU seems to be very powerful, and based on the design presentations of the M3 CPU, they are quite a lot faster than the snapdragon based one. But at a higher power usage.

But for dolphin, this doesn't matter at all, as we're highly bottlenecked by a stupid OpenGL behavior for buffer streaming. But there is a simple hardware-independent extension which solve this behavior. It is required on desktop GL for years, but not for GL ES. ARM has choosen not to support it: https://community.arm.com/graphics/f/discussions/4645/gl_ext_buffer_storage-support

Feel free to increase the noise in their forum asking for EXT_buffer_storage. Dolphin will will speed up from ~1fps right now to fullspeen on *many* games. Do you still remember the nougat update on SD820/835 - this was because of Adreno started to support this extension...

I plan to upgrade this year but I'm thinking as long as Mali GPUs are bad I'm better off looking for a SD845 device even if exynos has a *much* better CPU. I mean there's always a chance ARM GPUs would be better, but that's not the sort of thing I'll hold my breath on.

(02-26-2018, 01:20 AM)degasus Wrote: [ -> ]Their CPU seems to be very powerful, and based on the design presentations of the M3 CPU, they are quite a lot faster than the snapdragon based one. But at a higher power usage.

But for dolphin, this doesn't matter at all, as we're highly bottlenecked by a stupid OpenGL behavior for buffer streaming. But there is a simple hardware-independent extension which solve this behavior. It is required on desktop GL for years, but not for GL ES. ARM has choosen not to support it: https://community.arm.com/graphics/f/discussions/4645/gl_ext_buffer_storage-support

Feel free to increase the noise in their forum asking for EXT_buffer_storage. Dolphin will will speed up from ~1fps right now to fullspeen on *many* games. Do you still remember the nougat update on SD820/835 - this was because of Adreno started to support this extension...

Hmm, then I'll be looking forward to dolphin impressions with the SD845 version.

(02-26-2018, 12:13 PM)LG Fanatic Wrote: [ -> ]Hmm, then I'll be looking forward to dolphin impressions with the SD845 version.

But samsung releases their new phones with Vulkan working on Mali. And Dolphin has working vulkan backend, no?

(02-27-2018, 04:30 PM)sirdaniel Wrote: [ -> ]But samsung releases their new phones with Vulkan working on Mali. And Dolphin has working vulkan backend, no?

We have a vulkan backend. But expect every feature of their vulkan driver as broken which is not tested by benchmarks: https://twitter.com/dolphin_emu/status/860021683008163845

60% of 3600 is arround 2000, even with throttling it will be as fast as peak performance of Exynos 8890 and Snapdragon 835. This CPU with decent GPU would be the emulator king.

(02-28-2018, 12:35 AM)Guilherme Wrote: [ -> ]60% of 3600 is arround 2000, even with throttling it will be as fast as peak performance of Exynos 8890 and Snapdragon 835. This CPU with decent GPU would be the emulator king.

It doesn't work like that.