Dolphin GameCube/Wii Emulator Lands Its Vulkan Backend

[lucrus]

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

As usual.

[Awesomeness]

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

Dolphin Emu in general is a showcase for a great open source project. Just look at their awesome monthly progress reports: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2016/10...eptember-2016/

[geearf]

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

From what I've read so far, it seems Dolphin's graphical paradigm does not benefit much from Vulkan or DX12 in theory.
But in practice, these newer backends are better for various reasons (that should be backported to older DX and OGL, or the common parts) and the drivers are better too, especially for AMD.

[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...

[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.

[labyrinth153]

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

[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)

[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.

[Michael]

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

[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.