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I wonder if there are any gains to be had on the M1 because it uses shared memory between the CPU and GPU - much like the actual Gamecube architecture. From re
by etaioinshrdlu 5y ago
I wonder if there are any gains to be had on the M1 because it uses shared memory between the CPU and GPU - much like the actual Gamecube architecture.
From reading this blog, Gamecube games often made heavy usage of the memory-sharing capability of the hardware - which made emulation on PCs a performance challenge.
- astrange 5y agoThis certainly isn’t the first shared memory GPU that Dolphin runs on, although it might be the fastest and it’s definitely the fastest TBDR one. A problem that I don’t think applies to consoles is that GPUs don’t use the same texture format CPUs do - they swizzle them in proprietary ways and it needs conversion even if there are no memory transfers.
- Rhedox 5y agoYou most likely still need to do all the work to manage texture caches because first of all, you need to create texture objects in the host graphics api based on what's essentially just memory. On top of that, GC/Wii texture formats might be different from what the host can support. From my understanding it's not that useful for reading back either as the main bottleneck there is the fact that you need to sync gpu and cpu rather than transfer speed.
- etaioinshrdlu 5y agoNow you've made me wonder why Dolphin can't store textures and all GPU data in the same form in memory as the Gamecube -- and do any translation on-the-fly in shaders.