I've been following the development of Cemu (http://cemu.info/), the Wii U emulator that I'd consider the equivalent of Dolphin if it were closed-source.
One big difference I've noticed is regressions. While Dolphin has an insanely strong regression suite and plenty of people testing for regressions, Cemu seems to randomly go back and forth on support for games.
Part of it is probably how early in the game it is compared to Dolphin, but part of me wonders if being closed source means it's development won't ever reach Dolphin levels of quality
I'm not sure this is a symptom of a closed-source vs. open source debate, although it can surely be cast that way. Dolphin is a role model for open source projects: many active and talented contributors, excellent project organization and discipline, and a focused community rallying behind one project rather than dozens. (Dolphin is the only GC/Wii emulator worth anything and therefore attracts all GC/Wii emulator contributors. Compare that to the impossibly fractured GBA emulator scene, or to a lesser extent N64).
Measuring Cemu against this holy grail is a fool's errand. Cemu is so early and so immature that it's impossible to tell where it will go. But we do know this: Cemu is, for now, very well funded[1] and so far Nintendo has turned a blind eye. As long as customers keep paying in and getting meaningful progress back out, I see a long and successful future ahead of it. Hell, Cemu is doing better as a business (despite not being one) than some actual companies I've worked at.
As far as the future of Cemu and the capabilities of Wii U emulation in the long term? I encourage you to read the Dolphin wikipedia article[2] and notice that Dolphin's origins are shockingly similar to Cemu's. Will it follow a similar path? Who knows? The reality is Dolphin didn't have the benefit of Patreon in 2008, and Cemu devs must be making good money...
Love reading the status updates from the Dolphin Emulator, although I don't even have a machine with a powerful enough GPU to run their emulator, it's fascinating to read about the technical implementations, especially when I used to own a GameCube and Wii back in the day.
I can answer why. The writers are not all developers. One of them has Linux as a daily driver but I do not believe they have Vulkan working. So, they just opted to not mention it, which is better than making things up.
Theoretically, Vulkan should be great for Linux users, since GL took a large hit when tev_fixes_new got merged. But I haven't tried it either :)
I feel like the primary reason this is pointed out that way in the article is to defend their stance on removing the older DirectX backend. For a very long time, DirectX (9 and 12) was the fastest backend on Windows, and I believe it still outperforms OpenGL.
For what it's worth, I have the Android build of Dolphin on my phone (Pixel XL) and it seems to perform more quickly under Vulkan, but has some major graphical problems that prevent it from being playable. I suspect that once those are worked out, Vulkan will outperform OpenGL, but I'm not familiar enough with the project to say anything for certain.
They didn't pick Vulkan because of the performance, they picked it because their Vulkan driver is better maintained, yet still performs as well as D3D12.
[+] [-] BoorishBears|8 years ago|reply
One big difference I've noticed is regressions. While Dolphin has an insanely strong regression suite and plenty of people testing for regressions, Cemu seems to randomly go back and forth on support for games.
If you look at this unoffical "change report" you see a lot of comments mentioning that: https://www.reddit.com/r/cemu/comments/6d3nwc/180_megathread...
Part of it is probably how early in the game it is compared to Dolphin, but part of me wonders if being closed source means it's development won't ever reach Dolphin levels of quality
[+] [-] sturmen|8 years ago|reply
Measuring Cemu against this holy grail is a fool's errand. Cemu is so early and so immature that it's impossible to tell where it will go. But we do know this: Cemu is, for now, very well funded[1] and so far Nintendo has turned a blind eye. As long as customers keep paying in and getting meaningful progress back out, I see a long and successful future ahead of it. Hell, Cemu is doing better as a business (despite not being one) than some actual companies I've worked at.
As far as the future of Cemu and the capabilities of Wii U emulation in the long term? I encourage you to read the Dolphin wikipedia article[2] and notice that Dolphin's origins are shockingly similar to Cemu's. Will it follow a similar path? Who knows? The reality is Dolphin didn't have the benefit of Patreon in 2008, and Cemu devs must be making good money...
[1] https://www.patreon.com/cemu [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin_(emulator)
[+] [-] tyingq|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] inDigiNeous|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jchw|8 years ago|reply
Theoretically, Vulkan should be great for Linux users, since GL took a large hit when tev_fixes_new got merged. But I haven't tried it either :)
[+] [-] zeta0134|8 years ago|reply
For what it's worth, I have the Android build of Dolphin on my phone (Pixel XL) and it seems to perform more quickly under Vulkan, but has some major graphical problems that prevent it from being playable. I suspect that once those are worked out, Vulkan will outperform OpenGL, but I'm not familiar enough with the project to say anything for certain.
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