Testing the Wayland backend for Dolphin-Emu

[小龙 陈]

Hi everyone,

I did some testing with the new Wayland backend for Dolphin-emu posted here
yesterday: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-February/007470.html

Hopefully someone find them useful. Please let me know if you have any
questions (I'm no developer :D) or if there's anything else you would like me
to test.

Best Regards,
Xiao-Long Chen


----------
Build info
----------
Dolphin-Emu Git Master
 -> cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/dolphin-emu-master \
             -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

Dolphin-Emu Wayland-EGL Branch
 -> Built against wayland commit: df1a934b8b24c9227d427f3035007867993a6612
    and weston commit:            1cc9e08d2fbd59e34cf5009acd5067a6b171c20a
    and mesa commit:              dd599188d2868838541859a76800a8420958d358
 -> CXXFLAGS="-I/opt/wayland/include -L/opt/wayland/lib" \
      cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/dolphin-emu-wayland \
               -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/opt/dolphin-emu-wayland \
               -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
               -DUSE_EGL=1     \
               -DDISABLE_WX=1  \
               -DUSE_X11=1     \
               -DUSE_WAYLAND=1

-------
Testing
-------
The testing was done on a Lenovo W520 with Intel Sandy Bridge graphics and an
NVIDIA Quadro 2000m. I used the Intel GPU because nouveau has rendering issues
with dolphin. The game tested was Super Smash Bros Brawl (for Wii).

The system is running Ubuntu 13.04 with wayland, weston, and mesa compiled from
git. I did record videos of all of the tests, but they don't really show
anything. Ffmpeg with x11grab had a ~40% performance hit, recordmydesktop was
incredibly stuttery and had a low bitrate, and Weston's built in recorder had a
~60% performance hit in full screen mode (and a 10GB file).

Needless to say, the videos are useless, so I'll write my general findings on
the quality.

----------------------
Dolphin-Emu Git Master
----------------------
Windowed (640x480)
 -> X11: Always 60 fps

Full Screen (1920x1080)
 -> X11: Usually 60 fps (with no compositing), 49~52 fps (with compositing)

------------------------------
Dolphin-Emu Wayland-EGL Branch
------------------------------
Windowed (640x480)
 -> X11:     Unplayable:
               Sometimes it runs at 60 fps, but the area from the bottom right
               corner of the window to the center of the window continuously
               flickers. Other parts of the screen are also corrupted while the
               game is running.
               Other times, the game runs at 0~16 fps and the top ~15% of the
               window is corrupted.
 -> Wayland: Usually 60 fps with occasional slowdown to 57 fps

Full Screen (1920x1080)
 -> X11:     Unplayable: same as in windowed mode
 -> Wayland: 57~60 fps with occasional slowdown to 53 fps

-------
Quality
-------
X11 without compositing was pretty stuttery at times, especially when the game
slowed down (ie. with 4 players in SSBB). With compositing enabled, the game
was slow, but it was very smooth.

Under wayland, the gameplay was very smooth like in X11 w/compositing, but it
felt much faster. The fps generally stayed around 60 fps, except during the
graphically intensive parts of the game. I was not able to find any rendering
issues that didn't exist in X (or Windows, for that matter).

X with EGL was completely unplayable. The problems with rendering makes it
very hard to press the buttons necessary to even enter the game.