Rust is still showing it’s strength (and potential!), although we approach a point where zero cost abstractions start breaking (quantum level?). Thus, we conclude that the explanation lies in Metal implementations/drivers, which work most efficiently when the hardware queue is immediately available (which is not the case for Immediate recording). Unlike Dota, in this case we didn’t have many small command buffers that the Deferred recording would be able to stitch together. This is similar to Dota2 results, but we still find it surprising that Immediate did not get ahead this time. Of the gfx configurations tested, the Deferred+MT showed best results. Subjectively the game plays much smoother in gfx-portability as well. Consistency difference is especially visible on AMD, where we produce rock solid frame rate. The average frame times decreased by 4% on Intel machines, and significantly decreased by 22% on AMD machines. In Dolphin, gfx-portability provides faster and more consistent frame rates. The output was then fed to a simple analysis tool which produced the average and variance of the numbers. Results Test/Libraryįrame times where gathered using Dolphin’s built-in logging, which was manually turned on/off for that 20 second time span. We also played a bit with Dolphin’s “Backend multi-threading” option (or “MT” for short) because we had doubts whether this is the right approach when used with a normal Vulkan driver. The library was built from tag 0.5 using a simple make version-release command. gfx-portability itself was selected by pointing LIBVULKAN_PATH environment to it. These where configured using GFX_METAL_RECORDING environment.

Store EFB Copies to Texture Only must be enabledĪs with Dota2, gfx’s Metal backend was tested in 2 modes: one with Immediate command recording and one with Deferred.

The Dolphin settings used for the benchmark were:

We ensure the game window is on screen and in focus while being benchmarked. proposed a simple benchmark scenario: run the game Metroid Prime 2 (US), load into Sanctuary Fortress, wait for the animation to finish, and finally record 20 seconds of frame times (without providing any input to the game). After games appeared to render correctly, we shifted our focus to performance to ensure they also render quickly.

For Dolphin, we previously focused on visual correctness. Previously, we benchmarked Dota2 and were able to run many other applications and engines successfully, including Dolphin Emulator. This post is focused on the Metal backend only. We are also building a Vulkan Portability implementation based on it, which allows non-Rust applications using Vulkan to run everywhere. It’s a single Rust API with multiple backends that implement it: Direct3D 12/11, Metal, Vulkan, and even OpenGL.

Gfx-rs is a Rust project aiming to make graphics programming more accessible and portable, focusing on exposing a universal Vulkan-like API.

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