The long awaited Dolphin 5.0 release is finally here! After nearly a year of bug-hunting and handling the release process, everything has come together for our biggest release yet! The three previous releases followed a very distinct pattern: sacrifice performance, hacks, and features in exchange for higher accuracy. As such, Dolphin 3.0, 3.5, and 4.0 progressively grew slower. But thanks to the cleanups put forward throughout those releases, Dolphin 5.0 is the fastest Dolphin has ever been!
By removing all of those hacks and outdated features while cleaning up the codebase, Dolphin has reached a new level of efficiency, powered by a revitalized dynamic recompiler. On the GPU side, OpenGL and D3D11 have seen tons of optimizations and accuracy improvements, and have been joined by a brand new D3D12 backend for huge performance gains. If there’s a CPU or GPU extension that can make Dolphin faster, we take advantage of it.
Dolphin is an incredibly impressive project – not just from a technological standpoint, but also from an organisation one. They post regular, detailed development updates, have in-depth release notes that are still entirely readable for laypersons such as myself, and you always learn a ton of new stuff following the project’s progress.
A great example of how to run a project like this. Don’t forget to check out the release video with tons of side-by-side examples of the long list of improvements.
I think someone forgot to actually write what it actually is..
https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/faq/
🙂
Dang, dolphin the stupid game emulator, not the Dolphin the great file manager. I was excited for a bit there. And confused. Why would a file manager have much GPU optimization?
My first guess was the mobile browser (which I’ve never used personally, so don’t know what version it’s at) due to all the GPU and performance oriented stuff written. Second guess would’ve been the file manager, like you. Third guess would’ve probably been dolphin safe tuna of some sort. Not once did game emulators come to mind.
Edited 2016-06-25 08:32 UTC
Oh yeah that dolphin. It kinda worked well, from what I remember. I dropped it when chrome for android came out.
Or Dolphin Smalltalk, which is what I thought it was talking about. I don’t think I had ever heard about the emulator.
Your domain knowledge is not domain knowledge
Tried for a couple of minutes on their website to figure out what this actually is. Mentally refused to go into FAQ for that purpose. Decided if that was necessary, the site was made by idiots and I better not waste any more time with it.
Dolphin 5.0 didn’t improve anything for me. F-Zero GX still runs like shit, slowdowns all the time… and I have a pretty good machine (Maxed out Mac Pro 2013 dual gpu).
Anybody knows what kind of hardware do you need to run F-Zero GX at acceptable speed??? (60fps, no slowdowns)
F-Zero GX happens to be one of the most demanding games because it uses a whole bunch of tricks to squeeze out the most out of the hardware, so you would probably have better luck even with one of the better looking games like Super Mario Galaxy.
You may want to read their wiki page on F-Zero though:
https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=F-Zero_GX
Pretty sure OS X sucks at SLI (Dolphin will use only 1 GPU), has terrible drivers, and the D300 isn’t a gaming card anyway.
Try it on Windows, with a proper GPU from the past 3-4 years.
Edited 2016-06-25 07:25 UTC
It’s a dual D500. I tried it on Windows 10, it’s the same. I know FirePros are shitty GPUs, but I can run almost any game at 1080p without problems under Windows 10.
IMHO Dolphin is not so perfect as some people try to sell it.
Low-clocked xeons aren’t useful in dolphin and neither is SLI. I’m sure you know that. A 5ghz skylake should about do it.
raom,
Yea, I’ve never used dolphin, but I’ve experienced this elsewhere.
While the industry has been pushing multi-core processors, it only helps up to a point and in many cases starts to hurt performance. It’s often the case that single threaded performance is compromised as the number of cores goes up. Sure enough, this is the case for the macpro line, where the lowest models have a significantly faster speed (4 core * 3.7GHz) while higher spec models use slower core speeds (12 core * 2.7GHz).
One of the programs I’m writing for a client is a multithreaded CPU-bound process that ran well on my local 4 core/8 thread i7-3770 3.4GHz-3.9GHz machine but actually stuttered on a 14 core/28 thread E5-2695 2.3GHz-3.3 GHz machine running in the field. While my program was delegating work to all the cores, the granularity of tasks was such that individual cores could not keep up in real time. I needed to make changes to the multithreading granularity to compensate for the slower core speed.
Interesting, didn’t know about that. Taking into account Xeons are idling 80% of the time when I run F-Zero GX, I’m almost sure the problem here is Dolphin’s lack of SLI support.
Just for the records, I have D500 not D300. I know it’s not a good GPU for gaming at all, but It runs The Witcher 3 1080p perfect under Windows 10… so I think Dolphin is the problem here (OSX is not because F-Zero GX sucks on Windows too).
Thanks for the info man!
SLI is extremely tricky to take full advantage of in the first place. When emulating another GPU, I would be very surprised if it could be used very well.
Emulation is inherently not very parallelizable. Asking it to be somehow parallel on the GPU is kind of ridiculous.
Lmao!! A crappy Mac from 3 years ago. Silly apple trendies. =)
Aha… and very proud of it.
I develop a 8-bit megaman-like game (Rockbot) and have a port for Wii. While I do own a Wii, and the original console is great for testing controllers, for debugging and error catching purposes, Dolphin is an amazing tool with printfs and debug tool.
Until now, I had to run my game in software render mode because SDL based apps simply would not show on OpenGL renderer. And, because my machine is not a shiny octa-core or anything like that, it is slow as hell!
With this new version I can finally run it with hardware accelerated video, and that will make porting my game to Wii much more easy and fast. So I have only to thank the Dolphin team for this amazing new version.
Only wish I still have, is a way to set a folder in your machine as SD cart, ebcause I have to keep mounting sd.raw to edit game’s data file,