To date, the only accuracy related option available in redream is the per-pixel polygon sorting. Rather than claim the hardware was too slow or put a few features behind options, another ~10 percent was instead squeezed out of the driver. Our renderer had been through the wringer for weeks and performance still wasn't where it needed to be on the Pi. If a change is fundamentally slower, all other code is on the optimization chopping block until performance breaks even.Īn example of this are the changes upstreamed to Mesa. Refusing to compromise means that these new features and accuracy improvements aren't tucked away behind options and that each is thoroughly tested for performance regressions.

The less obvious, for each new feature and each accuracy improvement we refuse to compromise on performance.

The obvious, games needs to run full speed on these low-power devices.

The reason for the constant focus on optimization is twofold: Redream has never slacked on performance, but during the past year a substantial amount of effort has went into optimizing it even further. These patches serve to not just improve redream, but any OpenGL applications running on the Raspberry Pi.

Outside of optimizing and improving redream itself, patches have been upstreamed to Mesa to grind out more performance on the Pi and patches have been pushed to SDL to expand on its KMS driver. That is, there are no speed hacks, no underclocking and no different or gimped code paths - users running on the Android and Pi get the exact same product. In addition to this work which was required to just get up and running, a huge effort has went into optimizing in order to ship the exact same product that's available for Windows / Mac / Linux on these platforms. User interface was overhauled to work well with touch devices.New JIT compilers were written for 32-bit and 64-bit ARM.The rendering backend has been upgraded to support OpenGL ES.The app was updated to work on 32-bit platforms.

The largest push this past year has been getting redream running on power-efficient but low-performance ARM platforms. In this past year, support has been added for multiple new platforms to make the emulator accessible, performance has dramatically increased, new features such as save states and cheat support have landed to make emulating more fun, and numerous accuracy improvements were made to continue polishing the overall emulation experience.

Hot off the presses is our latest stable, version 1.5.0, marking the second stable release since the last progress report.

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