Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Dolphin Emulator Drops D3D12 Backend, Focuses On Vulkan

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Dolphin Emulator Drops D3D12 Backend, Focuses On Vulkan

    Phoronix: Dolphin Emulator Drops D3D12 Backend, Focuses On Vulkan

    Dolphin Emulator, the open-source cross-platform game console emulator for the GameCube and Wii, has been continuing to improve its Vulkan back-end and is also moving forward with its work on a Qt user-interface...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    While the Dolphin Emulator had rolled out a Direct3D 12 back-end, they have now pushed it into the dump, following the earlier removal of their D3D12 back-end.
    What?

    Comment


    • #3
      Originally posted by M1kkko View Post

      What?
      Earlier D3D9 removal, fixed. Thanks.
      Michael Larabel
      https://www.michaellarabel.com/

      Comment


      • #4
        Less duplicated effort is always good in my book.

        Comment


        • #5
          Well, the main reason to drop D3D12 is that there is no maintainer anymore. The original developer vanished.

          Comment


          • #6
            It's an clever choice for a multiplatform software.

            Comment


            • #7
              I like the wxwidgets UI because it is native in GNOME, plus it's an area I've contributed to Dolphin fixing the text/background contrast in the rom list. I have virtually no qt desktop applications.

              Comment


              • #8
                Originally posted by legluondunet View Post
                It's an clever choice for a multiplatform software.
                Apparently they're having better results with Vulkan even on Windows, so it made sense even from a single-platform perspective.

                Comment


                • #9
                  Originally posted by microcode View Post

                  Apparently they're having better results with Vulkan even on Windows, so it made sense even from a single-platform perspective.
                  No.

                  In most cases we found the D3D12 backend to be faster. It was faster because it did some threading tricks that the Vulkan backend currently doesn't do. However, that performance advantage slims significantly on higher end systems.

                  The D3D12 backend showed the most benefit for Intel iGPU users that could support D3D12, but not Vulkan. This was a lot of users. Intel iGPUs dominate our top GPUs used stat in analytics.

                  While it's unfortunate, we chose to keep the code base easier to maintain, and dropping D3D12 let us do just that. This was the biggest reason. Due to needing a very specific version of the Win10 SDK, retargeting the project to a new version every time the SDK updated wasn't feasible. As it requires buildbot admin coordination as well. And since we have no idea how microsoft intends to manage the Win10 SDK with VS 2017 which we recently migrated to, if microsoft chooses to constantly update it, that's a huge headache for us.

                  Additionally, the maintainer of the D3D12 backend pretty much disappeared after getting it merged to master, and due to the questionable quality of the code, none of the regular graphics devs wanted to touch it. It fell out of feature parity and users were frustrated that nobody was fixing anything in that backend.
                  Last edited by Helios747; 04 June 2017, 12:20 PM.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Originally posted by Helios747 View Post

                    No.

                    In most cases we found the D3D12 backend to be faster. It was faster because it did some threading tricks that the Vulkan backend currently doesn't do. However, that performance advantage slims significantly on higher end systems.

                    The D3D12 backend showed the most benefit for Intel iGPU users that could support D3D12, but not Vulkan. This was a lot of users. Intel iGPUs dominate our top GPUs used stat in analytics.

                    While it's unfortunate, we chose to keep the code base easier to maintain, and dropping D3D12 let us do just that. This was the biggest reason. Due to needing a very specific version of the Win10 SDK, retargeting the project to a new version every time the SDK updated wasn't feasible. As it requires buildbot admin coordination as well. And since we have no idea how microsoft intends to manage the Win10 SDK with VS 2017 which we recently migrated to, if microsoft chooses to constantly update it, that's a huge headache for us.

                    Additionally, the maintainer of the D3D12 backend pretty much disappeared after getting it merged to master, and due to the questionable quality of the code, none of the regular graphics devs wanted to touch it. It fell out of feature parity and users were frustrated that nobody was fixing anything in that backend.
                    Hopefully the adoption of Vulkan as a first class citizen in prominent projects (including Dolphin) will encourage Intel to support it in future chipsets. Obviously that does nothing to help the computers already sold...

                    Comment

                    Working...
                    X