Emulator

Maybe a stupid question: often games only need the medium setting of texture caching (that is much faster than the safe setting), but in the game.ini is always put the safe texture caching no matter if it is really needed or not...why?

Medium works okay in a lot of games that require safe, but they still don't work correctly. For that extra boost to accuracy, safe is used.

For an example where medium works fine, Starfox Assault uses medium in the INI.

Fiora's faster hashing code helps a lot, but I'm not ready to close this issue until we can get it even better.

Some info i found out by staring at the code:
safe setting = 0
medium setting = 512
fast setting = 128

But what does that mean? Well for medium and fast it means that the algorithm calculates the hash with 512 or 128 pieces of the data, with each piece being 64 bit in size. So the fast setting actually calculates the hash for every texture with just 1 KB of its data, no matter its size, and the medium setting uses 4 KB. This results in the fast setting being 4 times faster than the medium one.

The safe setting(0) is taken out with an if, and forces the algorithm to calculate the hash with all the data.

So how does this info help? Well, it explains the huge speed difference between the safe and medium that can happen in some games. Hashing 10 times more data, or even more, is possible there.

Now add the fact that the .ini settings don't force the value to be 0,512 or 128 and then we get? - Trying a higher number for games where:

1. the medium setting is way more than fast enough to play the game
2. the medium setting still has glitches
3. the safe setting is unplayable slow

TLDR: Use 1024, 2048 or 4096 in the .ini file for iSafeTextureCache_ColorSamples(or what's it called in the .ini), for games where safe caching is too slow and medium has bugs.

Hope this helps a bit

I think 512 is safe setting, not medium...

hashless. please, someone other than me do it and stop messing with useless hashes

If I don't remember wrong the problem of the old hashless branch (2012?) was that you had to use copy to RAM in order to get rid of the problems that actually medium or safe cache fixes

We could add an option to not rehash textures until a cache invalidation command was given. This would likely speed this up much, but I'm pretty sure it will break some games.

@JMC47: why does the ztp minimap require the safe hash? Do you use efb2ram cache?