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.

In July the Vulkan back-end was declared feature complete while since then more fixes went into the code and now it's finally landed in Git master.

As of last night, the Vulkan back-end is merged. Adding the Vulkan graphics API support to this game emulator ended up taking more than 15,000 lines of code. Those wishing to learn more about Dolphin's Vulkan support can also see this pull request. The Vulkan support comes months after Dolphin's Direct3D 12 back-end.

With Unity publishing their experimental Vulkan support, Dolphin now having mainline Vulkan support, etc, it's great to finally see more publicly available software making use of this new high-performance Khronos graphics API. At the same time, the work on RADV for the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver is especially promising for Linux gamers.