| CTOJAH |
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MAME Addict
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DOLPHIN boost !
#333058 - 10/10/14 06:10 PM
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Tafoid |
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I keep on testing.. testing.. testing... into the future!
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Reged: 04/19/06
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Posts: 3137
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Loc: USA
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Re: DOLPHIN boost !
[Re: CTOJAH]
#333060 - 10/10/14 06:31 PM
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> How GameCube/Wii emulator Dolphin got a turbocharge
> http://www.pcgamer.com/how-gamecubewii-emulator-dolphin-got-a-turbocharge/
>
> We need she (Fiora Aeterna) around here (at least for GameCube alike games in MAME)
>
> Dolphin emulator's page.
While likely much of the discovery and research done by them would be helpful in REAL emulation of the consoles, I have to assume they are taking as many shortcuts and avoiding as much CPU/DEVICE emulation as possible to even get a chance at running full speed on the fastest computers. Such tactics would not be included in MAME's scope which is to emulate it as fully and as accurately as possible. Also, the stance of allowing an IP some years of downtime after discontinuation also gives computers time to get faster to make such REAL emulation possible. 
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Re: DOLPHIN boost !
[Re: Tafoid]
#333062 - 10/10/14 07:42 PM
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The whole emulator still suffers from that old familiar problem of severe lagging caused by needing to cache the insanely high speed GameCube memory calls for textures and geometry.
I really don't see how they will be ever be able to overcome that problem without unified memory architecture with slow ass x86 based memory bandwidth.
..the whole emulator and games need to run off the GPU VRAM memory, if such a thing is possible??
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Re: DOLPHIN boost !
[Re: Tafoid]
#333071 - 10/11/14 01:38 AM
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> While likely much of the discovery and research done by them would be helpful in REAL
> emulation of the consoles, I have to assume they are taking as many shortcuts and
> avoiding as much CPU/DEVICE emulation as possible to even get a chance at running
> full speed on the fastest computers. Such tactics would not be included in MAME's
> scope which is to emulate it as fully and as accurately as possible. Also, the stance
> of allowing an IP some years of downtime after discontinuation also gives computers
> time to get faster to make such REAL emulation possible.
Improving the DRC so it covers more PPC instructions and improving the accuracy of FPU rounding _is_ real emulation. Not being MAME doesn't mean noting they do is worthwhile.
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| R. Belmont |
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Cuckoo for IGAvania
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Re: DOLPHIN boost !
[Re: Vas Crabb]
#333114 - 10/12/14 09:21 AM
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> Improving the DRC so it covers more PPC instructions and improving the accuracy of
> FPU rounding _is_ real emulation. Not being MAME doesn't mean noting they do is
> worthwhile.
Yeah, although the concept of a fallback to interpreter mode doesn't exist in MAME; if you start up with the DRC enabled, you run every instruction on the DRC.
The major difference is that even though MAME's had a 2-pass DRC forever we don't actually do any optimizations on either the intermediate code or during the x86 backend (nobody on the team is a compiler specialist). The general consensus is that at some point we'll start translating MAME IR to LLVM IR and use LLVM to do optimization passes and final codegen, which should greatly improve the performance of the DRC and significantly boost the headroom of how fast of a system we can emulate.
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| CTOJAH |
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MAME Addict
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Reged: 07/13/10
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Posts: 980
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Loc: Macedonia,Veles
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Re: DOLPHIN boost !
[Re: CTOJAH]
#333159 - 10/13/14 05:58 PM
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I've just tried Donkey Kong Country Returns with the newest build of Demul and...
...WOW !!!
It runs on my PC exactly like other WINDOWS games ! Looks better than original thankfully to gfx enhancements of emulator !
2D games (New Super Mario Bros Wii, Kirby Epic Yarn...) was good enough before this newest boost, at least on my PC.
My specs :
Intel Core i7 930 2.8 GHz
6 GB DDR3 ram (3 x 2 GB)
ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB GDDR5
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Re: DOLPHIN boost !
[Re: CTOJAH]
#333160 - 10/13/14 06:56 PM
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Re: DOLPHIN boost !
[Re: Ziggy100]
#333218 - 10/15/14 04:38 AM
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> The whole emulator still suffers from that old familiar problem of severe lagging
> caused by needing to cache the insanely high speed GameCube memory calls for textures
> and geometry.
>
> I really don't see how they will be ever be able to overcome that problem without
> unified memory architecture with slow ass x86 based memory bandwidth.
>
> ..the whole emulator and games need to run off the GPU VRAM memory, if such a thing
> is possible??
Dolphin Ishiiruka fixes the cache lag issue in all the games that suffer from this issue.
It's an unofficial build, but I will tell you this much: All the MP games and F-Zero all run like butter now when using this build. Actually from what I can tell, every game I've thrown at this special build runs incredibly smooth. You should check it out, it was just updated on 10-11-14 with the fixes from the latest official svn.
Unfortunately from what I read, the devs have 0 plans in integrating the cache lag remedies, which is beyond my understanding, as this issue happens on even the most powerful pc's.
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Re: DOLPHIN boost !
[Re: Trnzaddict]
#333226 - 10/15/14 10:56 AM
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Quote:
Dolphin Ishiiruka fixes the cache lag issue in all the games that suffer from this
issue.
Doesn't fix much for me.
As an example, Try the fighting game Tatsunoko Vs Capcom and pull off a special move, the frame rate still crashes down to 30-40fps from a buttery smooth 60fps whilst it does its caching business.
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| R. Belmont |
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Cuckoo for IGAvania
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Re: DOLPHIN boost !
[Re: Ziggy100]
#333244 - 10/15/14 05:05 PM
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> The whole emulator still suffers from that old familiar problem of severe lagging
> caused by needing to cache the insanely high speed GameCube memory calls for textures
> and geometry.
Is there a link to an actual technical discussion of this? Because as stated it's gibberish.
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Re: DOLPHIN boost !
[Re: R. Belmont]
#333264 - 10/16/14 02:29 AM
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> Is there a link to an actual technical discussion of this? Because as stated it's
> gibberish.
The GameGube has some 1T-SRAM buffers with very fast access from both GPU and GPU, so you effectively get free texture upload. Each buffer is also on a dedicated bus so it doesn't suffer contention.
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| R. Belmont |
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Cuckoo for IGAvania
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Reged: 09/21/03
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Posts: 9716
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Loc: ECV-197 The Orville
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Re: DOLPHIN boost !
[Re: Vas Crabb]
#333316 - 10/16/14 09:38 PM
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> > Is there a link to an actual technical discussion of this? Because as stated it's
> > gibberish.
>
> The GameGube has some 1T-SRAM buffers with very fast access from both GPU and GPU, so
> you effectively get free texture upload. Each buffer is also on a dedicated bus so it
> doesn't suffer contention.
I'm aware, I shipped half a dozen GameCube games and 3 more on the Wii. I'm just unclear how this is a problem for emulation, since the default for emulation is that DMA transfers etc. are free/instantaneous.
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Re: DOLPHIN boost !
[Re: R. Belmont]
#333361 - 10/17/14 02:14 PM
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> I'm just unclear how this is a problem for emulation,
I assume he's talking about the emulator slowing down due to it having to upload textures to the graphics card.
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Re: DOLPHIN boost !
[Re: ]
#333369 - 10/17/14 03:05 PM
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I think it's also down to the time taken to convert those textures and effects to modern compatible shader routines, then display them.
I'm a bit vague on the actual technical details, I read this along time ago on the Dolphin forums.
All I know is once they've been cached the lagging usually goes away, so perform a special move in a fighting game, that will stutter like crazy the first time you execute it, but any subsequent use of that special move will be lag free. So in order to have a 100% lag free experience, you'd need to have cached every single possible combination that could be called from the Gamecubes GPU, which obviously isn't practicable.
Edited by Ziggy100 (10/17/14 03:06 PM)
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