Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Serious graphical glitching - full screen - Vulkan

Been using Dolphin for years...since the past few Dev releases, graphical artifacting/glitching has become a problem. After a random amount of time, graphical glitches dominate the screen in full screen mode, Vulkan back-end. Hitting Alt + Enter to go from windowed mode back to full screen temporarily alleviates the issue, but it does return eventually, sometimes withing a few seconds or minutes. Always reproduceable. I've included a screenshot showing some of the glitching (can certainly post more if necessary). Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour 

Dolphin version: 5.0-17527

First of all outside of vulkan is your graphic setting at default, if not what changes have you made. Does it do it with other backends. Have you tried updated dolphin and\or update your amd drivers. Is this a recent issue and if so do you know if there were any windows update that might have updated graphic drivers. Lastly maybe it a corrupt file, try download a new copy of dolphin and putting a portable.txt in the same folder as dolphin and see if it still does it. I don't have the game so I don't know if this is game related as unlikely that might be. A example of this is nvidia cards with some game that use vp6 video have graphic error on cut scene without certain setting being used.

Thanks - I will try replacing the dolphin directory with the latest dev version to find out if that takes care of it. I haven't changed any graphical settings (I run at 4k internal resolution, force 16:9, 2xSSAA, most everything else is at default) for many months if not longer than that, maybe a year. I download the latest Dev version quite regularly, whenever updates come out, so generally the only time I'll run into a bug is after updating the application.

I haven't tried any of the other graphics back-ends but will to see if the same problem is reproduceable, beyond just Vulkan. That screenshot I posted only shows some glitching, the whole screen is often artifacted or corrupted after a minute or two, but it's trickier to get a screen shot showing the full extent. Mario Golf is the main title I play regularly, I have not noticed this behavior with Wii titles, such as Mario Galaxy, etc. I'll have to try some other GC games to determine if it's just those titles that are affected.

Issue still occurring after overwriting the Dolphin-x64 directory with a brand new copy, dev version 5.0-17536. Alt + Enter or hitting escape to get out of full screen mode, then going back into fullscreen mode gets rid of the odd graphical artifacting. This issue began occurring after updating to the latest Dev version of Dolphin a few days ago. Prior to that, I had never experienced this problem. Last Graphics drivers update was 9/22/22, AMD Radeon 22.9.2. GPU is an AMD Radeon RX 6700XT. 

The screenshots were taken from a separate instance of Dolphin, version 5.0-17536, running with portable.txt in the directory. I configured the graphics options so they were similar to what I had in my non-portable Dolphin instance, leaving most values at defaults, though setting the back-end to Vulkan, Force 16:9, 4k internal resolution, hybrid ubershaders. Again, I've used these settings for the better part of a year or longer without any glitching of this nature. The game always runs fine initially, after a few minutes of gameplay, the odd artifacting crops up. Pausing the emulation, or Alt + Enter to go in and out of fullscreen fixes the problem, until it returns again.

Same situation here. I am sure that it was working perfectly until v5.0-17316. Today I tried with the v5.0-17536 and it was unplayable using Vulkan.

(10-04-2022, 11:21 AM)Snowblind Wrote: [ -> ]Same situation here. I am sure that it was working perfectly until v5.0-17316. Today I tried with the v5.0-17536 and it was unplayable using Vulkan.

Thanks for the confirmation. I'm seeing the same behavior on 2 separate systems using Vulkan...one is AMD the other Nvidia. I think the problem cropped up in a more recent release, but I can't be certain which one it was. I tend to read the release notes when updating and noticed there were some Vulkan-related changes made to the Dolphin Dev version within the past week or two. I'm confident it'll probably wind up being fixed in an upcoming release.

Further testing using other graphics back-ends...

D3D11 and D3D12 do not appear to have the graphical glitching/artifacting issues, though Vulkan performs better on my particular systems.

Did previous builds of Dolphin not have this issue? If so, what was the most recent version you have tried that didn't exhibit this issue?

(10-04-2022, 12:26 PM)MayImilae Wrote: [ -> ]Did previous builds of Dolphin not have this issue? If so, what was the most recent version you have tried that didn't exhibit this issue?

Correct...older builds, going out about a week ago, did not seem to have this problem. It showed up in one of the newer dev builds. I'll have to download a bunch of older builds and test them to find out.

Snowblind may be correct about v5.0-17316 being the last version before the particular artifacting issue cropped up. Since I only play a few titles in Dolphin, I'm a bad test case as I don't know how many other game titles may or may not be affected. My guess off-hand would be that other Camelot titles (such as Mario Tennis for GC) might exhibit the same artifacting issues with Vulkan as the back-end on newer builds, that's just speculation though.

Can you bisect to find the problem?

Basically, bisecting is cutting the unknown in half until you no longer can. So like, you stated that 5.0-17316 doesn't have the issue, but 5.0-17527 does. So that's an unknown of 211. So try the build in the middle, which would be 5.0-17422. Just keeping halving the unknown and you should be able to find the exact version where the bug appeared.