#Dolphin emulator black screen ingame drivers
#Dolphin emulator black screen ingame driver
#Dolphin emulator black screen ingame android
#Dolphin emulator black screen ingame Offline
#Dolphin emulator black screen ingame mac

We couldnвЂ™t get hold of a device powered by Tegra 4 yet (they are expensive!), but we are really curious to see how Dolphin would perform on them, given that the bottleneck for Dolphin on Android is now mostly GPUs and their drivers.

#Dolphin emulator black screen ingame drivers

Given that our experience with mobile drivers has beenвЂ¦ less than good (this article will talk about that in details later), we are really curious to see how good NVIDIA drivers for the Tegra 4 SoC are.

#Dolphin emulator black screen ingame Offline

The NVIDIA official forums also go offline for extended periods of time, making it hard to rely on them for support and/or documentation. When we reported our NVIDIA + OS X rendering issue, we also received no answer. Every time we have tried asking NVIDIA about some slowness in their implementation (GL calls serializing in the driver), we received no answer from their official forums.

Getting support or technical answers is difficult for open source developers.

If relicensing the SDK is impossible, looking for an exported symbol in our binary as it is currently done for NvOptimusEnablement sounds like a fairly good idea to us.

#Dolphin emulator black screen ingame driver

We could use the NVIDIA Graphics SDK to force the driver to give us a high performance profile, but the GPL forbids us to do so, leading to degraded performance for some NVIDIA users. The NVIDIA driver often detects Dolphin as an application which requires little GPU performance, which we assume is due to how we have to operate for accurate emulation (lot of stalling on GPU->CPU transfers, leading to very short average command queue length).

Licensing for the NVIDIA Graphics SDK that is incompatible with GPL licensed applications (including Dolphin), coupled with bad analysis of GPU performance requirements.

We could probably blame the lack of support for this feature on the Khronos group instead, but AMD didnвЂ™t wait for Khronos to support this use case. In Dolphin, we have an optional horrible hack that allows us to bypass the lack of this extension by copying data in unmapped buffers (ugghhh), which actually works for our purpose but make us very sad. AMD drivers started supporting this feature long ago through the AMD_pinned_memory extension. This feature is added to OpenGL by the ARB_buffer_storage extension (part of OpenGL 4.4).

No support for client side buffer storage (until their very latest beta driver version): because of how emulation works, Dolphin needs client-side buffer storage to be fast.

We could almost have called NVIDIA 'perfect' for our use case here, but their drivers actually have a few minor issues that are not directly bugs: It basically works great on the subset of OpenGL we use. Before the OpenGL backend rewrite, we actually had one bug happening only on OS X machines running NVIDIA graphics cards, but itвЂ™s unclear whether it was due to an undefined behavior on our side or a bug in NVIDIAвЂ™s drivers. We had no occasion to test NVIDIA's response time to driver issues because we actually never had any issue with NVIDIA's OpenGL implementation, either on Windows or on Linux. Here is basically our hall of shame of graphics drivers, sorted by the number of issues we found, how hard it is to report issues to the company and how many bugs were actually fixed. More than that, on Android, OpenGL ES 3.0 support is extremely recent and only a couple applications on the Play Store use ES 3.0 features.

It turns out very few applications use some parts of the OpenGL standard we need to rely on to accurately emulate a GameCube GPU. Sadly, using recent, advanced OpenGL features also meant we got to discover how bad some graphics drivers actually are at doing their job. This rewrite was merged into the main Dolphin codebase a few months back and started to be used by tens of thousands of Dolphin users, either on OS X and Linux where it is the only viable graphics backend, or on Windows where it is available alongside our D3D11 graphics backend. While this rewrite was needed for other reasons (it provides the foundations for very cool optimizations), compatibility with mobile devices and the future Android port of the emulator (now in beta) was one of the key goals.

#Dolphin emulator black screen ingame mac

In light of the recent announcements by NVIDIA and AMD in support of Linux for their graphics drivers, we would like to share with the world some of the experience we had developing our open source project, Dolphin, a GameCube and Wii emulator for Windows, Linux, Mac and recently Android.ДЄt the beginning of this year, after the successful release of Dolphin 3.5, Markus Wick (degasus) and Ryan Houdek (Sonicadvance1) started working on a rewrite of Dolphin's OpenGL backend in order to be compliant to the OpenGL ES 3.0 standard.