Dolphin GameCube/Wii Emulator Lands Its Vulkan Backend

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Dolphin GameCube/Wii Emulator Lands Its Vulkan Backend

The past few months we've written a few times about the Dolphin Emulator working on a Vulkan back-end. Dolphin is an open-source project providing cross-platform emulation for Nintendo's GameCube and Wii games. That back-end has now been merged to the mainline code-base...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Dolphin-Vulkan-Lands

[rabcor]

Damn these guys aren't kidding around implementing it this fast.

[johanb]

Since dolphin is very CPU intensive on a single core it would be very interesting to see benchmarks of OpenGL vs Vulkan performance differences on a few games.

[ElectricPrism]

Since dolphin is very CPU intensive on a single core it would be very interesting to see benchmarks of OpenGL vs Vulkan performance differences on a few games.

This. Dolphin is a excellent test subject for Vulkan vs OpenGL performance IMO.

[Michael]

ElectricPrism johanb unfortunately not aware of any automated capable dolphin tests.

[BtbN]

Michael it shouldn't be too hard to set up automated dolphin performance tests. You can use a lot of the TAS features like savestates and input playback.

For me on NVidia Pascal, there is no noticeable difference between Vulkan and OpenGL.
But I heard from AMD users that it's a quite nice speed increase for them.

[johanb]

Just read the pull request. The author doesn't give any exact numbers, but the improvements he claim seems to be similar to other Vulkan/DX12 games.

- Performance in my brief testing is slightly above OpenGL on nVidia
- AMD seems roughly ~25% faster compared to OpenGL in some scenarios (apart from needing the dualsrc blend fallback)

[labyrinth153]

Gonna have to see if vulkan works on os x. I doubt it.

[BtbN]

Gonna have to see if vulkan works on os x. I doubt it.

There is no Vulkan on OSX. Apple instead went with their own API.

[davidbepo]

i tested the vulkan backend before its merge
on intel the performance is a bit lower, but its driver fault for not having hiz,guarband clipping...