Libretro Cores Quick Look - Flycast Dreamcast emulator - Vulkan renderer! (Windows/Linux/Android)

Channel:

LibRetro

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32,700

Published on December 13, 2019 12:49:46 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59EsPynoJ6o

Game:

RetroArch (2022)

Duration: 9:59

10,845 views

185

See here the Dreamcast emulator core Flycast running several games on #RetroArch using the brand new Vulkan renderer. This Vulkan support is available right now for Windows, Linux, and Android.

Yes, per-pixel alpha transparency also works on Android, but it's heavily memory bandwidth-limited. It has been tested on a Mali G76 (Samsung Galaxy S10) - and it runs acceptably at 640x480 or 800x600 resolution. Your mileage may vary depending on the GPU power inside your Android phone.

Some clear advantages of the Vulkan renderer is that frame pacing is much better than the OpenGL renderer, and performance is far higher when it comes to texture uploads and/or framebuffer manipulation. For example - when you KO an opponent in Dead Or Alive 2 against an explosive wall - the framerate would often tumble a bit on GL, but no such issues with Vulkan. Similar improvements can be noticed in Virtua Tennis 2 - when certain framebuffer effects happen after a replay, performance is much more steady with Vulkan thanks to the high degree of parallelism.

With Vulkan, we have heard reports that virtually all sound crackles and stutters are gone. That's because with vulkan you choose the sync points where you wait. In GL the driver has to guess and sometimes it fails. These effects are using render to texture, and with OpenGL this creates sync issues.

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