Previously we had decided to busy loop on systems due to Windows' scheduler being terrible and moving us around CPU cores when we yielded.
Along with context switching being a hot spot.
We had decided to busy loop in these situations instead, which allows us greater CPU performance on the video thread.
This can be attributed to multiple things, CPU not downclocking while busy looping, context switches happening less often, yielding taking more time
than a busy loop, etc.
One thing we had considered when moving over to a busy loop is the issues that dual core systems would now face due to Dolphin eating all of their CPU
resources. Effectively we are starving a dual core system of any time to do anything else due to the CPU thread always being pinned at 100% and then
the GPU thread also always at 100% just spinning around. We noted the potential for a performance regression, but dismissed it as most computers are
now becoming quad core or higher.
This change in particular has performance advantages on the dual core Nvidia Denver due to its architecture being nonstandard. If both CPU cores are
maxed out, the CPU can't effectively take any idle time to recompile host code blocks to its native VLIW architecture.
It can still do so, but it does less frequently which results in performance issues in Dolphin due to most code just running through the in-order
instruction decoder instead of the native VLIW architecture.
In one particular example, yielding moves the performance from 35-40FPS to 50-55FPS. So it is far more noticeable on Denver than any other system.
Of course once a triple or quad core Denver system comes out this will no longer be an issue on this architecture since it'll have a free core to do
all of this work.
Seems to be pretty high in the profile in some geometry-heavy games like The
Last Story, and the compiler-generated assembly is terrifyingly bad, so
SSE-ize it.
Just use regular boolean negation in our pixel shader's depth test everywhere except on Qualcomm.
This works around a bug in the Intel Windows driver where comparing a boolean value against true or false fails but boolean negation works fine.
Quite silly.
Should fix issues #7830 and #7899.
This shader constant was previously used for depth remapping in D3D and for pixel center correction. Now it only serves one purpose and the new name makes it clear.
This particular issue was fixed in the v66 (07-08-2014) development drivers from Qualcomm.
To make sure we cover all drivers that may or may not have the issue fixed, make sure to mandate v95 minimum to work around the issue.
The next commit is the actual work around for post processing for this.
Due to changes in how we render to the final framebuffer we no longer encounter this bug.
With the change to post processing being enabled at all times and no longer using glBlitFramebuffer, Qualcomm no longer has the chance to rotate our
framebuffer underneath of us.
This particular bug from our friends over at Qualcomm manifests itself due to our alpha testing code having a conditional if statement in it.
This is a fairly recent breakage this time around, it was introduced in the v95 driver which comes with Android 5.0 on the Nexus 5.
So to break this issue down; In our alpha testing code we have two comparisons that happen and if they are true we will continue rendering, but if
they aren't true we do an early discard and return. This is summed up with a fairly simple if statement.
if (!(condition_1 <logic op> condition_2)) { /* discard and return */ }
This particular issue isn't actually due to the conditions within the if statement, but the negation of the result. This is the particular issue that
causes Qualcomm to fall flat on its face while doing so.
I've got two simple test cases that demonstrate this.
Non-working: http://hastebin.com/evugohixov.avrasm
Working: http://hastebin.com/afimesuwen.avrasm
As one can see, the disassembled output between the two shaders is different even though in reality it should have the same visual result.
I'm currently writing up a simple test program for Qualcomm to enjoy, since they will be asking for one when I tell them about the bug.
It will be tracked in our video driver failure spreadsheet along with the others.
We will now rely on Memory::CopyFromEmu to do bounds checking.
Some games actually load palettes from 0x00000000, despite the
fact no valid palette data should ever be there.
Fixes Issue 7792.
The timing information is set on s_scaled_frame->pts, giving precise
timing information to the encoder. Frames arriving too early (less than
one tick after the previous frame) are droped. The setting of packet's
timestamps and flags is done after the call to avcodec_encode_video2()
as this function resets these fields according to its documentation.
Markus Wick