Did Anyone try Dolphin+Vulkan on RPi4 ??

RedMarsBlueMoon

With the continued progress on the RPi Vulkan driver I was wondering if anyone has tried it with Dolphin on the RPi4 ?

I know the Vulkan driver is not fully done for the pi 4 but I got the impression it was pretty close.

RedMarsBlueMoon

Wait a minute, Dolphin is only 64bit these days it seems? And the current/first version of the RPi Vulkan driver is 32 bit. So it's probably going to be a while longer before this can be tested.

mitu

Are you referring to https://github.com/Yours3lf/rpi-vk-driver ? That's an alternate driver, not the one announced/developed by Raspberry Pi Trading, which is hosted at https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/apinheiro/mesa/-/tree/wip/igalia/v3dv and should work on an 64 bit OS.

See this forum post for an install script.

RedMarsBlueMoon

Ahh there's two different ones! No I hadn't realized that.
So that's what this 'MESA' thing is, a Vulkan driver? Or is it something else as well? (EDIT: reading about MESA now...)

So the alternative one is newer than the official one, do you know why the alternative one is being made? What is the advantages over the official one?

mitu

@RedMarsBlueMoon said in Did Anyone try Dolphin+Vulkan on RPi4 ??:

So that's what this 'MESA' thing is, a Vulkan driver?

No, it's much more. Take a look at Mesa3d.org.

So the alternative one is newer than the official one, do you know why the alternative one is being made?

Because the developer felt Vulkan would be a worthy feature to add to a Raspberry PI and liked the challenge ?

What is the advantages over the official one?

The only advantage is that it supports older PI models, but it lacks GLSL support, so it's not/will not be a full - compliant - Vulkan driver.

RedMarsBlueMoon

@mitu said in Did Anyone try Dolphin+Vulkan on RPi4 ??:

Because the developer felt Vulkan would be a worthy feature to add to a Raspberry PI

Ok, so MESA when used on RPi4 will support/use functioning Vulcan?
And if Dolphin is built for MESA then it will take advantage of V and be as fast is it currently can be.

I'm going to have to take a look at those ETA Prime vids again and see if I can make out what his build is using.

UPDATE: I just watched his video again and it says MESA 19.1.4 at startup.
It also warns about 'EXT_buffer_storage' + says that 'performance will be terrible'.
I have read mentions of 'EXT_buffer_storage' in Pi|Dolphin discussions but I don't know if they said it particularly was a big block on perf.

UPDATE 2: Watching the videos by this 'Revengee' guy, he updated MESA to 19.3 which got rid of the 'buffer_starage' error. But in the Video he also says that he's hopeful that 'Vulkan support' will further increase performance in the future.

So is he incorrect and him using MESA means that he's already using Vulkan ?
Or is the Vulkan in MESA not compatible with RPi4?
Or? I'm confused.

mitu

@RedMarsBlueMoon said in Did Anyone try Dolphin+Vulkan on RPi4 ??:

So is he incorrect and him using MESA means that he's already using Vulkan ?

No, EXT_buffer_storage refers to the OpenGL (ES) driver features, not Vulkan.

Or is the Vulkan in MESA not compatible with RPi4?

There is no Vulkan support right now in Mesa for any Pi model, is still under development. When it will be ready, it will probably be merged into Mesa.

I wouldn't get my hopes high, even with Vulkan support, Dolphin might still be too slow to be useful on the Pi4. Time will tell.

RedMarsBlueMoon

Thanks for the clarifications!
I will work on my hope suppression!

George

There's been recent work to include Vulkan support in Mesa for Pi. Here are some hopefully helpful links:

Most of the links go over similar steps for compiling, installing, and testing Vulkan and its demos. Some additional notes:

The older posts point to a developer's fork of Mesa. Now that Vulkan has been merged into Mesa, whereever you see a git clone you'll want to make sure that you're pointing to Mesa's repository (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/)
You'll be able to get Vulkan from the master branch of of the Mesa repository. It doesn't look like it's been tagged to a release yet, so there's likely more work to be done and your mileage may vary.
You can actually have different versions of Mesa installed on your system simultaneously, as long as you put them in different directories. In order to ensure stability of my Pi systems, I do this, so I can test and play around while not worrying about everything else. Though Mesa is pretty self contained so it's not too hard to get things back to normal if you overwrite the original drivers.
If you have compiled Mesa for installation in another directory, then you'll need to add the following line to your launch scripts or your bash profile in order to point programs to your special installation. You do that with the following line:
- export VK_ICD_FILENAMES=[YOUR INSTALLATION PATH]/share/vulkan/icd.d/broadcom_icd.armv7l.json
I've found that Raspbian/Raspberry Pi OS (which is what RetroPie is built on) actually uses NVIDIA's Vendor Neutral Dispatch version of Mesa (which uses code from Mesa), and not Mesa's version of Mesa. I have no idea if that will be changing or not, but it at least indicates that there will be more work to do before we see Vulkan drivers as part of Raspbian/Raspberry Pi OS/RetroPie as a default.

I've been playing around with Vulkan and so far it's looking pretty good. I have high hopes that as programs begin to adopt Vulkan we'll be seeing some really awesome performance increases. I have not tried Dolphin though. The only thing I've found regarding Dolphin and Vulkan was someone testing it out on a Jetson Nano, which is a different hardware platform. He did compare Vulkan vs. OpenGL and found that Zelda: Wind Walker ran very well with Vulkan where it was choppy on OpenGL. The post is on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/retropieofficial/permalink/1387063751494192/).

I created a scriptmodule for my own purposes to automate building / installation of Mesa with Vulkan. I may create a separate post for that.

I hope this info helps out.

- George