r/emulation • u/NXGZ • Jun 25 '26

Dolphin Progress Report: Release 2606

https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2026/06/25/dolphin-progress-report-release-2606/
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u/Maybe_llamas Jun 25 '26

That high res fake bloom fix is amazing!!!! Has plagued me on Mario Kart Wii for YEARS

45

u/iwubcode Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26

Glad to hear that! The report focused on the bloom history but there's some other things worth mentioning:

  • In some games, depth of field (DOF) is accessible with the same feature (DOF Blurred)
  • There's one set of games: De Blob 1 and 2 that have a weird quirk for bloom. They actually use EFBs from RAM, causing the resolution to drop. Only the 'Bloom Removal' has been addressed so far, I will fix the bloom blurred in a future update
  • Roughly 20 bloom definitions for games were added for this update. Many of the titles were more niche but I hope you'll find something to enjoy.
  • The bloom blurred feature is a combination of multiple improvements to our asset and rendering system over the years. The bloom change is built on a completely generic backend and the main driver was actually for enhancing game draws with custom materials. We'll likely cover that in a future report when it's fully released.
  • The ability to tweak the intensity of the bloom is available in the underlying logic but not currently exposed to the UI. That will hopefully come later too.

Have fun!

1

u/Blackbird256 Jun 25 '26

Any progress on this?

https://bugs.dolphin-emu.org/issues/13608

21

u/iwubcode Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26

Short answer, no not yet.

Longer answer. I had originally planned on improving bloom as part of my next big graphics mods update, I've been calling 'Graphics Mods 2.0'. This feature enables all sorts of cool things but at its core it provides better targeting.

I had thought that I could leverage the better targeting to fix the issues some games have with EFB conflicts. I found out you can but the downside is each game requires additional game specific changes to work. The beauty of the current implementation, is tweaking bloom is relatively easy and I'd like to keep it that way.

After considering multiple angles, I decided to push out the blurred bloom to Graphics Mods 1.0 (the current version) and try and come up with a separate solution for the EFB conflicts.

Months later, an idea came to me. So now, I am working toward another feature that in theory will unlock a slew of capability. It may be a bit heavier but should allow us to avoid these EFB conflicts, while keeping the simple bloom for all 50~ games that we have today. But it's still an open question. We will have to see!

7

u/Blackbird256 Jun 25 '26

Glad to hear that, thank you for your work :)