Thursday, April 12, 2007

Texture cache

For a long time, I've been using a texture cache I coded for my own builds, that hasn't been uploaded to the CVS yet (neither I know it will be) as it needs a cleanup and uses some C++ only stuff which would be time consuming to port.

The main benefit you get from using a cache is uploading to openGL as little as possible per frame. In fact, it's rather simple: whenever a texture is going to be uploaded, you get some sort of magic number from the texture (I currently use some type of CRC) to be used as an identifier, if it's already in the cache you just enable it, if not, it's just a matter of uploading it to openGL and then adding it to the cache for further use.

In my current implementation I lack one important feature that wouldn't be hard to add: flushing unused textures. Dynamic textures or textures not longer used (from the previous level, menu or else) remain in the cache and, more important, in graphic cards memory. Right now is not that much of a problem, but I'm sure it would be after a few hours of gameplay.

I also toyed a bit with checking directly the palette texture formats prior to conversion, so I can save some precious cycles, but it's lacking serious testing: with paletted formats you've way less data, and CRC's are likely to collide easily, thus giving false matches while checking if cached, and glitching rendering. Anyway, seems like something important, as it can save quite a lot of CPU time.

Today's screenshot is based on some optimizations on the CRC creation, as some profiling showed it was taking too much time to compute. I changed a bit the way it works (and expect it to work as good as in the past :P) so I could get a bit more of performance. Along with some optimizations here and there, that's what I got:


That's running on the same configuration as the previous screenshots, a Northwood Pentium4 at 2.6ghz with a Geforce FX5600. I expect to get a bit more of speed in the future, but I'm not sure how much, as I've been unable to work on desmume in the 5-6 days. Oh, and the emulator menu is different from previous screenshots, as I'm using a build I use to develop stuff and then merge into the CVS: I never cared to change the menus from the base source code yopyop released.

11 comments:

Unknown said...

Well, nice work. Cache, huh?
I'm no tech wiz, but I like to read your entries and see how much progress you made so far.

Seems like the graphics are very slightly worse now. But it's awesome that you're trying to improve the speed.

Great work. *give you a vitual cookie*

shash said...

I'm not trying, I'm improving speed :P

Anyway, graphics looks "worse" due to filtering disabled, as I disabled bilinear filtering to be as accurate to the DS hardware as possible.

Unknown said...

Hello.....
Excellent work for you emulator
my pc is Atlhoxp 2.0,512 ram, geforce 4 (128)

my pc run your emulator ?

shash said...

Uchiha: Well, you CPU is quite a bit slow, so you won't get fast speeds, atleast on 3D games. 2D games might a bit more playable, but don't expect full speed.

lowlines said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
lowlines said...

cache sounds like a brilliant idea, and I know what it means too :p I've noticed though when you compare DeSmuME to No$GBA, atm testing with 2D games (ie Digimon World DS) it pauses everytime the screen changes say from menu to world map etc
Cos it's loading all the textures in each time. I would think cache would make this pause shorter :p
nice work shash

Luichi said...

Nice stuff u got going there. Do u post links for ur emulators?

Unknown said...

XTra KrazzY(I'm XTra here for some reason):
Suggestion: try making a boolean var for each texture that becomes true whenever it is used and every Nth texture load check which textures weren't loaded (by checking which boolean is 0/FALSE), delete them from memory, and falsify all of the other used textures. Not smart but simple...

shash said...

It's way easier to just timestamp textures, update it on use, and delete them if they weren't used in a certain configured time. For example, is a texture hasn't been used for 1500ms, just delete it from memory. Or even better, change this life time span depending on current memory usage on the 3D card :P

lowlines said...

this the idea ur gonna employ then shash :p

Unknown said...

Maybe keep textures in memory indefinitely unless a memory usage threshold is exceeded. If that happens, begin throwing out the oldest textures until the memory usage is below the threshold again.