Dolphin Emulator Is Working On A Vulkan Backend

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Dolphin Emulator Is Working On A Vulkan Backend

This week saw the release of Dolphin 5.0 as a big update to this open-source emulator for Nintendo GameCube/Wii titles. While there is an experimental Direct3D 12 back-end, not present for this release was any Vulkan support, but it's being developed...

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

[Hi-Angel]

Why would they develop DX12 either — aren't Vulkan and DX12 pretty much similar? Then it's an effort split for no gain.

[bachchain]

Why would they develop DX12 either — aren't Vulkan and DX12 pretty much similar? Then it's an effort split for no gain.

Both the Vulkan and DX12 back-ends are being developed by people that aren't part of the main team.

[Hi-Angel]

Both the Vulkan and DX12 back-ends are being developed by people that aren't part of the main team.

I'm not sure though about the Vulkan developer. The news appeared also on reddit, I asked the same question, and got a similar answer:

The DX12 backend was just like this, a third party just came by and said "Hey, want a DX12 backend? I have one just for you guys."

At the very least, it has served as a great proof-of-concept just how beneficial these sort of APIs can be for emulation.

But there's also a link to this post, where the Vulkan backend dev participates in discussion, and I see he (phire) is an author of some blog posts of Dolphin progress.

[bachchain]

Except the PR wasn't written by phire, it was written by stenzek

[Ouroboros]

But there's also a link to this post, where the Vulkan backend dev participates in discussion, and I see he (phire) is an author of some blog posts of Dolphin progress.

stenzek is the author of Vulkan PR, not phire. AFAIK, stenzek only recently started contributing to Dolphin and isn't currently part of the Dolphin Emulator group on GitHub.

If I remember correctly, the author of the DX12 backend had never contributed to Dolphin before and it kinda came out of nowhere. No one was expecting it, but it was definitely welcome and the developers helped him get into shape for merging into master.

For what it's worth, stenzek (Vulkan author) contributed all the missing features of the DX12 backend after it was merged along with a lot of fixes. If I remember correctly, he also fixed some long time bugs in the DX11 backend.

Here's a list of stenzek's PRs: https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolph...r%3Astenzek%20

[Prescience500]

Vulkan would be great, but what about Wayland?

[archie2016]

Vulkan would be great, but what about Wayland?

There is already xwayland.
Also see: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTMwNDE

[computerquip]

Wayland support isn't hard to implement.. it's just not used enough or has enough benefit to support directly at the moment. I'm still waiting on nvidia to stop making excuses for support.

[J?rnS]

Wayland support isn't hard to implement.. it's just not used enough or has enough benefit to support directly at the moment. I'm still waiting on nvidia to stop making excuses for support.

The support for Wayland is there - just nobody cares about it. I'm pretty sure Nvidia can't provide Wayland support via GBM because of GPL being too restrictive.