[Sesse__]

Basically, not at all. Dolphin's ubershader does one thing; simulate fixed-function blending/texturing using modern flexible hardware. (It was already an old technique when Dolphin adopted it, by the way.) This project is a complete renderer, with the rasterizer and all, and as you can see from the text, it includes an ubershader for the blending. The shader doesn't draw triangles, it just gets called for each point in the triangle and with some inputs and gets to decide what color it is.

It's vaguely like comparing a full CPU emulator with something that implements the ADD and MUL instructions.

[armada651]

> Dolphin's ubershader does one thing; simulate fixed-function blending/texturing using modern flexible hardware.

Just to clarify, Dolphin's specialized shaders simulate fixed-function blending/texturing too. What's different about ubershaders is that a single shader can handle a wide variety of fixed-function states whereas a specialized shader can only handle a single state.

Thus whereas specialized shaders have to be generated and compiled on-the-fly resulting in stutter; ubershaders can all be pre-compiled before running the game. Add to this the capability to asynchronously compile specialized shaders to replace ubershaders and the performance loss of ubershaders becomes negligible. A rare case of having your cake and eating it too.

[Sesse__]

This is very true. And to make matters even more confusing, certain drivers were at some point capable of constant-folding shaders on-the-fly so that ubershaders are essentially moved back into a bunch of specialized shaders, negating the entire concept. I don't believe this actually affects Dolphin, though (I think the drivers in question have given up this optimization).