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: It basically works great on the subset of OpenGL we use. Before the OpenGL backend rewrite, we actually had one bug happening only on OS X machines running NVIDIA graphics cards, but it’s unclear whether it was due to an undefined behavior on our side or a bug in NVIDIA’s drivers. We had no occasion to test NVIDIA's response time to driver issues because we actually never had any issue with NVIDIA's OpenGL implementation, either on Windows or on Linux. Here is basically our hall of shame of graphics drivers, sorted by the number of issues we found, how hard it is to report issues to the company and how many bugs were actually fixed. 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. It turns out very few applications use some parts of the OpenGL standard we need to rely on to accurately emulate a GameCube GPU. Sadly, using recent, advanced OpenGL features also meant we got to discover how bad some graphics drivers actually are at doing their job. 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. While this rewrite was needed for other reasons (it provides the foundations for very cool optimizations), compatibility with mobile devices and the future Android port of the emulator (now in beta) was one of the key goals.

In light of the recent announcements by NVIDIA and AMD in support of Linux for their graphics drivers, we would like to share with the world some of the experience we had developing our open source project, Dolphin, a GameCube and Wii emulator for Windows, Linux, Mac and recently Android.Īt the beginning of this year, after the successful release of Dolphin 3.5, Markus Wick (degasus) and Ryan Houdek (Sonicadvance1) started working on a rewrite of Dolphin's OpenGL backend in order to be compliant to the OpenGL ES 3.0 standard.

Dolhpin requires opengl 3.3