Nouveau NV50 Gets Patches To Help Dolphin Emulator By As Much As ~50%

If you are using the Nouveau Gallium3D driver there is now the possibility of having much better performance with the Dolphin emulator.

Some Nouveau Gallium3D patches were posted today for benefiting the Dolphin video game console emulator that targets the Nintendo GameCube and Wii. These patches improve the performance of integer multiplication for this aging open-source NVIDIA driver and can help out the Dolphin emulator in areas of fragment-heavy scenes by as much as 50%.


These patches improve the integer multiplication by avoiding the slow IMAD/IMUL instructions to instead prefer XMAD and further optimizing multiplication by immediates.

While Dolphin is a big benefactor of this work to yield more playable frame-rates with the older NVIDIA hardware, the performance in other games appears to be roughly the same. These tentative patches for now can be found on Mesa-dev.

Update: This performance help should apply to GM107 Maxwell hardware and newer.