Tag archives: D3D

Dolphin Progress Report: February and March and April 2019

The last few months have been absolutely hectic, with several long-awaited features hitting the emulator all at once. In order to keep users up to date with these major changes, the blog staff has been busy with feature article after feature article. It has been exciting, but also pretty exhausting! With us burning the candle at both ends to keep up with development, the Progress Reports have fallen a bit behind.

So here were are, bleary eyed and with three months worth of changes to go through. So without further delay, let's go through February, March, and April's Notable Changes! Please enjoy while we go collapse in the corner.

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The New Era of Video Backends: The Unification of VideoCommon

It's not common for a rewrite to be something that warrants an article, but, this is one of the exceptions. Over the past few years, parts of Dolphin's video core have seen renovations to make way for new features, but a fundamental problem remained. Dolphin's video backends suffered from both having too many unique features while also duplicating tons of code from the other backends, making it difficult to add new features and maintain old ones.

Those that have followed Dolphin from the very beginning may remember that its video backends …

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D3D9: Why It's Not a Part of Dolphin's Future

As many people have noticed, revision 4.0-155 removed D3D9 as a video backend, leaving D3D11 and OpenGL as the sole hardware backends in Dolphin. For the longest time, D3D9 was considered Dolphin’s fastest backend and was a favorite of Windows users. But then, why would it be removed?

While it was enjoyed by users, it was a source of endless frustration for the developers. D3D9 is inherently flawed, and working around its problems wasted time and slowed development. With D3D9 removed, the developers can focus their effort on making the emulator better instead of pandering to the ever growing demands of a flawed backend. This is why the D3D9 backend was removed.

D3D9: Inherently Flawed

Dolphin's D3D9 backend was mostly known for its speed. On AMD and Integrated Graphics cards, it is by far the fastest backend. But Direct3D9 is very old; it was released in 2002! Its age means that many modern features are simply not available for it, features that Dolphin needs for GameCube and Wii emulation. And that's where its speed came from. The D3D9 backend was as fast as it was because it simply didn't emulate certain effects. All kinds of modern functions are simply not possible in D3D9.

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