<clever>
benley: one of the first things they tried to do to solve the emulation and stutter, was to just not render things until the shader had been compiled
<clever>
but that leaves you blind, and certain games only render something once, and then reuses the result as a texture, which results in missing textures
<clever>
the crazy thing they did to make it all work, is that they emulated the entire bloody gamecube gpu, in another gpu, using shaders
<benley>
wow
<sphalerite>
emulator authors are the craziest of the crazy
<benley>
cemu seems to have a very similar issue with shader compilation; I wonder how they're handling it
<clever>
but that does have obvious performance costs
<clever>
so they only use that for ~100ms, while the host cpu translates the combination of texture flags into a proper shader
<clever>
then they switch over
<simpson>
TBF this exact design was proposed like a decade prior by Ian Romanick (he's on the GL and Vulkan committees) for how to get Mesa to support fixed-function games on shaderful cards.
<simpson>
And there was a proof-of-concept shader JIT called 'llvmpipe' which is shipped with Mesa.
<simpson>
But the Dolphin folks managed to get it all working and shipped.
<sphalerite>
llvmpipe works, no?
<benley>
didn't llvmpipe (or something very similar to it) end up in the apple's Quartz rendering pipeline at some point, to make it work well on various Intel "GPU"s?
<sphalerite>
Isn't it what's used now in absence of working hardware acceleration?
<simpson>
Yeah.
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<drakonis>
isn't qemu and llvm a core part of emulators for modern platforms?
<drakonis>
this stuff is crazy good
<sphalerite>
"this stuff" = still referring to qemu and llvm?
<drakonis>
no
<drakonis>
ubershaders
<drakonis>
its still impressive to behold
<clever>
yeah
<sphalerite>
dolphin is generally an amazing project
<clever>
let me see which emulator i had trouble with on nixos...
<clever>
ah, PCSX2, it has horid audio corruption, but is otherwise playable
<clever>
and now it fails to even initialize opengl
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<clever>
ok, PCSX2 is a 32bit elf
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<drakonis>
how's nixos acceptance right now?
<drakonis>
Nix/NixOS
<drakonis>
ie: is it seeing any sort of unofficial endorsement/usage by companies?
<drakonis>
i know mozilla and intel has some users
<MichaelRaskin>
Random upstream software sometimes includes .nix files. Haskell lists Nix among the recommended methods of managing the installation. Mozilla publishes a Nix overlay.