Dolphin is the popular emulation software that allows PC gamers to play GameCube and Wii titles from their PC powerhouses. Originally introduced in 2008, Dolphin utilized DirectX 11 or OpenGL 4 on a GPU to power the games.
Thankfully in December, user “hdcmeta” from the Dolphin fourms talked about experimenting with using DirectX 12 with Dolphin, boasting a 50% performance gain over DirectX 11. The performance was so much better, that DirectX 12 support has now been fully integrated into Dolphin.
While not quite hitting a 50% increase in framerate across all games, the gains are quite impressive on Nivida and AMD GPUs. Check out benchmarks ran by the Dolphin community below.
The support for DirectX 12 is still in development, meaning their is probably a fair share of bugs to work out. However, the upcoming Dolphin 5.0 will still have the integration along with a large performance boost. You can integrated the support into Dolphin 4 with unofficial downloads in the meantime. Check out more information here.
