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Ubershaders: A Ridiculous Solution to an Impossible Problem (2017)

When you're playing your favorite game on Dolphin with a powerful computer, things should run fairly well. The game is running full speed, there are no graphical glitches, and you can use your favorite controller if you want. Yet, every time you go to a new area, or load a new effect, there's a very slight but noticeable "stutter." You turn off the framelimiter to check and your computer can run the game at well over full speed. What's going on? The slowdown when loading new areas, effects, models, and more is commonly referred to as "Shader Compilation Stuttering," by users and developers alike. This problem has been a part of Dolphin since the very beginning, but has only recently become more of a focus.

While it has some fixed-function parts, Flipper features a programmable TEV (Texture EnVironment) unit that can be configured to perform a huge variety of effects and rendering techniques - much the same way that pixel shaders do. To put it into perspective, even among all the developers that work on Dolphin, only two or three people at most have the necessary knowledge on not only the GameCube/Wii hardware, but also modern GPUs, APIs, and the drivers to write, debug, and optimize the shaders. The delays proved costly, as he lost his fire to continue working on ubershaders thanks to burnout and increasing worries about driver and API limitations regarding the solution.

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