Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I noticed the water on Super Mario Sunshine was white on the save file selection screen, even though I had disabled GPU texture decoding to allow arbitrary mipmap detection to fix this issue.  I then disabled multiple parameters to see if there was an unexpected interaction, but the water would not look correct no matter what I tried.  I even renamed my user folder and allowed Dolphin to create a new one, then launched the game with all default parameters and got the same result.  

This makes me wonder if arbitrary mipmap detection is currently broken.
Could someone do a sanity check and see if they get the correct water color on SMS's save file selection screen with arbitrary mipmap detection enabled (it is by default on the included game ini file), and GPU texture decoding disabled?

It's working. Top image is with 16x anisotropic + arbitrary mipmaps disabled. Bottom image is 16x anisotropic + arbitrary mipmaps enabled.

I appreciate you taking the time to check. I toggled AMMD on and off while the game was running and with it off, the white area extends even further out, but with AMMD on I can't eliminate the artifact completely.
I wonder what is causing this.

Another clue I just found: with Vulkan, the water looks as intended for me, but with OpenGL and D3D11, I get the white water artifact.

I repeated my test of renaming my current user folder and letting dolphin start from scratch with a fresh user folder and settings file, and I can reproduce the issue, i.e., the white water artifact shows up with OpenGL and D3D11 but not with Vulkan.

I ended up opening a ticket and one of the devs responded but could not reproduce the issue either, even when starting from a fresh user folder (all settings at default values). Conclusion was this is likely a driver or GPU hardware issue.
If anyone has an AMD GPU and want to do me the favor, please check if you get water with the correct color after allowing Dolphin to launch the game with an empty user folder.

Giving this another shot...

If arbitrary mipmap detection is working for me with one gfx backend but not the others, how could I diagnose the issue?

If anybody has the game and an AMD GPU, could you check if it is working for you?

Solved!!!
My OCD kicked in and I finally tracked the culprit: the anisotropic filtering option in AMD driver software.  The tooltip says it only affects D3D9 applications, but turning it up above 2x breaks the arb mipmap detection in Dolphin.  Go figure.  I could have sworn I had checked with that setting turned off before but whatever; it's all good now.