Okay, so I'm a week late on this, but what the heck. Dolphin 5.0 was released on their website. The project is a Wii and GameCube emulator that is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This version focuses on compatibility. They claim that about 85% of titles, including WiiWare and virtual-console games, can be played from start to finish, with about 14% of all titles doing so flawlessly.
That said, it also adds several performance features. They improved the JIT compiler, added texture pooling to prevent reloading the same texture over and over, and even added DirectX 12 support, although they don't elaborate on why that would be useful for this workload. While they have not extended support to Vulkan, they do use the “Approaching Zero Driver Overhead (AZDO)” features of OpenGL and its extensions to raise performance on other platforms.
The emulator is available at their website.
The DX12 backend had been in
The DX12 backend had been in the development version for some time and there was a report by the developer on the improvement so maybe that’s why they omitted it this time. Also, it’s not as stable as the rest of the renderers if I’m not mistaken.
Other than Dolphin, ePSXe 2.0.5 was also released a couple of days ago for Windows, Linux and Mac if anyone’s curious.
The emulator is a beautiful
The emulator is a beautiful piece of work. Playing Wii and Gamecube games in 1080P upscaled with 16x ansio filtered textures and MSAA is truly beautiful.