Dolphin Emulator fixes high-resolution Bloom effects

The Dolphin GameCube & Wii emulator has earned its reputation as one of the greatest emulators of all time, but it didn't get there without issues. As of the most recent update, one of the longest-standing Known Issues—broken bloom effects at higher resolutions that often caused ghosting—has finally been fixed.

In case you weren't already aware, the Bloom problem actually results in significantly compromised visuals at higher resolutions, capable of producing full-screen ghosting in many cases.

The only two ways to fix Dolphin's bloom/ghosting issues are to play at the game's original SD native resolution or to use a Mod Pack/Gecko code to remove the effects entirely. Neither of those results are desirable, for obvious reasons.

While the games in question are still playable without the fix, the visuals do suffer from unwanted additional blur as a result. 

Below, we've embedded some before/after shots provided by the Dolphin developers. While the effects are hardly ground-breaking by modern standards, the fixes are still transformative for high-resolution GameCube and Wii emulation. Combined with modern features like Auto HDR, the final result could look even more impressive.

Games with effects highly reliant on the GameCube and Wii hardware's bloom effects included Metroid Prime Trilogy, Xenoblade Chronicles, the Super Mario Galaxy games, Sonic Colors, Donkey Kong Country Returns, and more. Even older or lower-budget games, like Okami or Shadow The Hedgehog, made heavy use of these effects. Per the Dolphin developers, literally dozens of games made use of these effects. Playing the games at high resolution without these fixes simply is not the same.

The fixes to bloom effects (applied by enabling "Bloom Blurred" under Graphics Mods in game settings) aren't the only milestones included in this update. Game Boy Player support, individual audio for Wii Remotes, improved cropping, and other great additions have also been added. Most of the attention has been on the Game Boy Player, which makes sense considering the gargantuan development effort required.