Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

How well will dolphin run on the m1 chip?

If Apple is to believe probably about performance. That said who knows if anyone well make an effort to port to the m1 since Apple been locking down macos more from what I hear. Let alone the fact they will have to work with a depreciation openlg and lack of vulken.

I tested the latest dev version available as of yesterday afternoon on the new base M1 MacBook Air (7 GPU cores, 8 GB of RAM) via Rosetta 2 x64 translation. Mario Kart Double Dash and SoulCalibur II ran near fullspeed using the Vulkan (MoltenVK) backend upscaled to 1440P. I'll test some more this evening, I expect it to handle 1080P without any problems. It should be noted that I was also installing Xcode and the initial Spotlight indexing was also running while I was doing this.

According to anandtech article, CPU is much better than previous intel x86 cpus. Thats suprising me because envy laptop was not so powerful and not ready for wide distribution. So in comparison Apple m1 is quite a replacement. Native mode is comparable even to AMD zen3 59xx, so i need to clear my screen for make sure. Rosetta is about 70% to 50% performance, sometime even better. While i am not fan of apple, i must admit this is new era.

Dolphin has a codebase for arm, apple encourage compilinig on both platforms (two binaries in one file?) so i believe native dolphin would be much faster.

Ah, and here is quite funny video of how water cooling Mac laptop does not help to improve performance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlOPPuNv4Ec
Arm cpu is just Apple philosophy of slick and thin devices.

It seems to have it's ups and downs.

For example, there is a lot of buffering issues with Rogue Squadron 2 and cutscenes/transitions with HLE Audio, but once you get into the actual game play, it is near perfect audio wise and and 95-100% overall speed. Some levels don't even need Audio Stretching enabled. LLE Audio is a lot smoother with cutscenes/transitions but still not perfect.

Rogue Squadron 3 sees an improvement in video rendering, still has speed issues.

On the other hand Metroid Prime Trilogy will bounce all over the place frame rate / speed wise, depending on where you are in the game @ 1080P. I saw as low as 58% speed and 102% speed. 720p is more stable - staying between 80 and 100% with only random quick dips to 50% or lower.

MPT isn't as prone to crashing with synchronize gpu unchecked - RS3 is hit or miss: sometimes it won't crash / sometimes it will. Clicking ignore error doesn't tend to kill the emulation anymore. But on the flip side, instead of a crash RS3 will sometimes just hang without gpu sync.

Ubershaders no longer kick the fan into overdrive, not even Asynchronous. I'm slowly testing games to see if they are even needed on Apple Silicon Macs.

This is obviously informal testing on a M1 MacBook Pro with 16GB of unified ram and 1 TB of nvme storage. A Universal build of Dolphin for macOS or even a Apple Silicon native build of Dolphin should perform even better.

That really impressive.

PRStoetzer, how high can you scale the internal resolution?

So, in a nutshell:

The few GameCube games I have for testing are happy up to 6x/4K resolution with all other settings at default. I believe they should be fine with 7x and 8x resolution, I just didn't test them.

Setting SyncOnSkipIdle = False, Rogue Squadron 2 keeps a steady 60fps even on Hoth. Although it does get hiccups occasionally when compiling shaders but is a lot better with transitions/cutscenes. I haven't tried the Death Star II missions yet, if it gets that same level of performance I have serious doubts my reflexes could keep up.

Rogue Squadron 3 is impressive to say the least. SyncOnSkipIdle = False and turn off Synchronize GPU Thread definitely brings speed improvements on the M1. With this, Revenge of the Empire bumps up to 20-30 FPS w/ 50-60 fps on the cutscenes. Once you start getting into later stages you get between 40-50 FPS on actual gameplay. The downside is that you will have trouble with CPU & GPU out of sync crashes on some stages.

Wii games seem to have a sweet spot between 3x/1080p and 4x/1440p with all other settings at default. With tweaking possibly could hit 5x native resolution, but I think 6x/4K would be pushing things too much currently.

Just picked up an M1 Mac mini, stock in store, 8GB memory, 256GB SSD. I have the issue with the SWITCH Lic Pro Controller Wireless being detected by Dolphin, running the newest beta release.

Tests of favorite games show UNBELIEVABLE performance tweaking. Crash Bandicoot for example I have an HD Texture pack work I've done from an older MacbookPro OpenGL, now is looking amazing, (the game adjusts the need for 60fps or 30fps just fine). at 4x native resolution, with 4x SSAA. Same for my HD textures of Burnout 2, just fantastic!!

All of this under 10% load on the M1. I am running a test release MenuMeters processor monitor tool to gage.

I believe there will be unbelievable quality emulation once Dolphin has support.

I'm sold, I've got an M1 Air coming in at the end of this month with the 8 core GPU (not that it will help too much).

IIRC running through Rosetta 2 knocks of 15-35% of performance depending on the application workload, so we could assume dolphin can squeeze out quite a bit more power with a native binary.
I think GPU performance is the same between native/Rosetta binaries.

(12-13-2020, 09:23 AM)garrlker Wrote: [ -> ]I'm sold, I've got an M1 Air coming in at the end of this month with the 8 core GPU (not that it will help too much).

IIRC running through Rosetta 2 knocks of 15-35% of performance depending on the application workload, so we could assume dolphin can squeeze out quite a bit more power with a native binary.
I think GPU performance is the same between native/Rosetta binaries.

Yes I think that is what I am seeing. So when Dolphin becomes updated to support the new controller requirements of Big Sur and becomes a binary for Apple M1, we are going to see 8k with 4x SSAA, which is just nuts. Anyway, I spent 3 days looking for a solution to my controllers that worked fine under older OS's no longer connected to Dolphin. Here is what I found:

Found a work around for my PowerA wireless remote, even though Dolphin displays the controllers in the config on Big Sur 11.0.1 and Dolphin 5.0-13240 I have found my own solution after digging up MANY other controller issues with passing off info to a troublesome app.


1. Configure Dolphin to use the Keyboard setup built into to the Mac
2. Download a key configure app called "Enjoyable" available here: https://yukkurigames.com/enjoyable/
3. Map each key from Dolphin's Keyboard config to the Enjoyable key mapping.
4. Attempt to use the controller in Dolphin's app will prompt a security request from Enjoyable
5. Launch Security & Privacy system preference and enable Enjoyable in Accessibility, that is the only Security setting needed..
6. Go back to Dolphin and launch a game.

This gave me a work around controller support. Good luck!

TLDR; Steam would recognize the PowerA wireless, and wired GameCube remotes, all steam games would work that supported a controller. The macOS Big Sur was recognizing the remote.It was Dolphin that was unable to capture the buttons until I mapped it
using Enjoyable.app to keyboard commands did I get it to work.