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

Written by Michael Larabel in Nouveau on 13 June 2018 at 08:37 PM EDT. 10 Comments
NOUVEAU
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.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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