Emulator

Bit harsh calling the existing description inaccurate. Its accurate in a sense its a hack outside OpenGL spec.

If I recall correctly work is underway to only have this option available to known working drivers? If thats the case then it will be worth amending it to something like JMC4789's description.

Agree with the two guys above though - the hack is great if its supported!

Degasus rewrote it, and now I'm rewriting it again after finding spelling errors.

Speed up vertex streaming using a loophole in graphics drivers. Enabling this option may give huge performance gains on supported graphics cards. But, on hardware that does not support the hack, the emulator may have severe graphical issues or crash outright.

Recommended ON if supported.

Tell me what you think, we can keep adjusting it.

Uses a loophole in NVIDIA's drivers for a performance improvement. There are no known problems with this option on NVIDIA systems, but it may cause issues on other chipsets.

Here's my proposal. "Vertex Streaming" is irrelevant to users and doesn't really matter. By cutting it out it makes the description shorter and simpler. We can have a longer description including vertex streaming in the dolphin manual (in progress).

But Degasus said it worked on Intel Chipsets as well, so we can't single out NVIDIA any longer.

Alright, easy enough to work around.

"Uses a loophole in the OpenGL specification for a performance improvement. There are no known problems with this option on most systems, but it may cause issues on ATi/AMD chipsets."

That's not a loophole though. It's defined as invalid.

We should totally be doing this in the IRC...

"Uses forbidden operations for a performance improvement in OpenGL. There are no known problems with this on supported systems, but ATi/AMD GPUs do not support it and may encounter issues."

I forgot something in my last changes. it really need to say OPENGL in the tooltip. We've had enough problems with morons enabling this in DirectX, so we need to say it everywhere to make sure they get the message.

What about this,

"Uses unsafe operations in order to improve the performance of vertex streaming in OpenGL. There are no known problems if supported, but will cause severe stability and graphical issues otherwise.

Recommended ON if supported"

Well, a few more tweaks.

"Uses unsafe operations to speed up vertex streaming in OpenGL. There are no known problems on supported GPUs, but it will cause stability and graphical issues otherwise.

Recommended ON. Disable if you encounter problems."

"Speed up" is shorter with fewer words and less syllables. It's a tooltip, and that's a free trim, so why not. Furthermore, I had a problem with the whole "Recommended on if supported by a GPU that may or may not be yours since we won't tell you" thing... I'm not comfortable spelling it out with things in such limbo though. So "Disable if you encounter problems" adds a little something to the "if" without telling the user to consider information they weren't given.

Please don't break the "If unsure, leave this unchecked" scheme.

Justification for the "If unsure, leave this (un)checked" scheme:
The description already helps people who know what they're doing, while adding "Recommended ON. Disable if you encounter problems" has no additional value to those people because they'll already have figured out the proper setting by reading the "main part" of the description. On the other hand, newbies won't be able to figure out whether to enable the setting or not. When they read "Recommended ON unless..." they'll get even more confused. That's the whole point of the "standardized" scheme: Give indecisive people a reliable suggestion that they can safely use.

The description should say "If unsure, leave this UNchecked.", because just because it works now on a limited set of tested setups doesn't mean a) it's safe to be enabled on all setups b) a future driver update won't break the "feature". Recommending this stuff possibly means that it's harder to realize the culprit if that stuff randomly seems to break at some point IMO.

Delroth and I agreed that it'd be best to recommend unchecking the vertex streaming hack and instead explaining the option in more detail in the performance guide, where it'd be recommended to be enabled.