Since the GameCube and the Wii are Unified Memory architectures, being able to do the same on PC would help us a lot and potentially make Intel IGPs usable with Dolphin.

This rewrite was merged into the main Dolphin codebase a few months back and started to be used by tens of thousands of Dolphin users, either on OS X and Linux where it is the only viable graphics backend, or on Windows where it is available alongside our D3D11 graphics backend.

It turns out very few applications use some parts of the OpenGL standard we need to rely on to accurately emulate a GameCube GPU.

More than that, on Android, OpenGL ES 3.0 support is extremely recent and only a couple applications on the Play Store use ES 3.0 features.

Before the OpenGL backend rewrite, we actually had one bug happening only on OS X machines running NVIDIA graphics cards, but its unclear whether it was due to an undefined behavior on our side or a bug in NVIDIAs drivers.

We could almost have called NVIDIA perfect for our use case here, but their drivers actually have a few minor issues that are not directly bugs.

This feature is added to OpenGL by the ARBbufferstorage extension (part of OpenGL 4.4).

AMD drivers started supporting this feature long ago through the AMDpinnedmemory extension.

In Dolphin, we have an optional horrible hack that allows us to bypass the lack of this extension by copying data in unmapped buffers (ugghhh), which actually works for our purpose but make us very sad.

We could probably blame the lack of support for this feature on the Khronos group instead, but AMD didnt wait for Khronos to support this use case.

The NVIDIA driver often detects Dolphin as an application which requires little GPU performance, which we assume is due to how we have to operate for accurate emulation (lot of stalling on GPU-CPU transfers, leading to very short average command queue length).

We could use the NVIDIA Graphics SDK to force the driver to give us a high performance profile, but the GPL forbids us to do so, leading to degraded performance for some NVIDIA users.

Every time we have tried asking NVIDIA about some slowness in their implementation (GL calls serializing in the driver), we received no answer from their official forums.

When we reported our NVIDIA OS X rendering issue, we also received no answer.

The NVIDIA official forums also go offline for extended periods of time, making it hard to rely on them for support andor documentation.

We couldnt get hold of a device powered by Tegra 4 yet (they are expensive), but we are really curious to see how Dolphin would perform on them, given that the bottleneck for Dolphin on Android is now mostly GPUs and their drivers.

There were no Piglit tests for UBOs offset, and maybe that test suite should be expanded a bit more to cover less used features.

Once again, we do not expect professional QA, and were delighted when the Mesa developers took our bug reports seriously and promptly came up with proper fixes andor debugging steps.

This means our application is still broken for users of LTS releases of some Linux distributions.

We consider ourselves lucky to have open-source drivers in a good enough shape to run heavy applications like Dolphin properly, especially when compared with the state of some proprietary drivers.

However, we are not aware of any bugs in the OpenGL implementation present in Intels IGP drivers on Windows impacting Dolphin.

Unfortunately, the supported feature set is also very reduced: Intel HD3000 IGPs, the most common IGPs used with Dolphin according to a quick sampling of our forums users, only support up to OpenGL 3.1 and Shader Model 4.1 on Windows (OpenGL 3.3 is supported on latest versions of OS X).

These IGPs support everything needed for OpenGL 3, except for MSAA support.

Because of this one missing feature, Intel decided to not implement any OpenGL 3 features for Ironlake, making it impossible for us to support this particular IGP.

Intel currently only provides the INTELmaptexture extension, which could be useful for texture mapping but provides no support for buffers mapping.

AMD seems to be leading this effort in the console world, and its very likely this will come back to the PC through OpenGL extensions at some point.

Opengl Driver For Mac