85% now. will .4ghz processor upgrade be enough for 100%?

[RORONOA ZORO]

Hello Dolphin community. GC was my first video game system and now that I found out about dolphin I'm excited to play some of my favorite old time classics as well as older awesome games I was too young to know about!

So from what I've read it seems that dolphin is very reliant on the CPU rather than the GPU. I've also noticed this first hand playing simpsons hit and run.

My current system is an early 2008 mac pro with 2 x 2.8 ghz quad core Xeon proccessors and I know that doesn't matter much as dolphin only uses 2 cores.
My current graphics is some lacking 512 MB AMD radeon HD 2800 xt or something.
8 gb of the good industrial style ram.

Anyways right now I'm getting on average 85% performance in simpsons hit and run with my 2.8 ghz processor and my bad graphics card on the default settings. The low being 60% and some choppy music and the high being 103%. (at standstill in the game I also get 100%)

My real question is that I am doing two major upgrades in the coming weeks...

First is I am getting a gtx 770 4gb graphics card from EVGA
and 2nd is that I am upgrading my 2 X 2.8 quad core xeon proccessors to 2 X 3.2 ghz quad core Xeons

? SO will these two upgrades allow me to run simpsons hit and run in dolphin full speed? Also will I be able to run the game at maxed out settings because my graphics card is pretty capable? Also would you say that simspson hit and run is a cpu intense game for dolphin because of the big open world? Thank you.

[NaturalViolence]

Which xeon cpus do you have now and which ones are you upgrading to? Clock rate isn't the only cpu spec. that effect performance. If it's the same generation of cpus then there would be little point in spending that amount of money to upgrade to something that is only marginally faster.

[ThorhiantheUltimate]

Uhm that 2008 Mac Pro is probably running with two Xeon E5462, and its running on the Penryn architecture, so its comparable to Core 2 Quads. If you are using the same Mac Pro with the same motherboard, no COMPATIBLE CPU is going to give you any good performance enhancements. Im pretty sure this isnt even Nehalem.

[RORONOA ZORO]

So right now I have Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors Harpertown/Penryn).

And I want to upgrade to: The Mac Pro "Eight Core" 3.2 (Early 2008) is powered by two 3.2 GHz Quad Core 45-nm Intel Xeon X5482 (Harpertown/Penryn) processors with 12 MB of level 2 cache per processor (each pair of cores shares 6 MB), a 128-bit SSE4 SIMD vector engine, and 1.6 GHz "64-bit dual independent frontside buses."

It's not that costly only 180$ buy it now on ebay for the 3.2 ghz. If I could find a newer version of processor compatible with my mac I would do it but I cannot find anything online that says that there is something better I can upgrade to then the 3.2ghz. Also is there some sort of program on PC that can Overclock my CPU via software. Non of that BIOS stuff because I think that won't work on a Mac. And then finally, there isn't some sort of program that threads together my cores to create some sort of super fast 3 core system is there? The real LAST question is... over time, will dolphin have better performance because of new breakthroughs by the developing team software wise?

[ThorhiantheUltimate]

So right now I have Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors Harpertown/Penryn).

And I want to upgrade to: The Mac Pro "Eight Core" 3.2 (Early 2008) is powered by two 3.2 GHz Quad Core 45-nm Intel Xeon X5482 (Harpertown/Penryn) processors with 12 MB of level 2 cache per processor (each pair of cores shares 6 MB), a 128-bit SSE4 SIMD vector engine, and 1.6 GHz "64-bit dual independent frontside buses."

It's not that costly only 180$ buy it now on ebay for the 3.2 ghz. If I could find a newer version of processor compatible with my mac I would do it but I cannot find anything online that says that there is something better I can upgrade to then the 3.2ghz. Also is there some sort of program on PC that can Overclock my CPU via software. Non of that BIOS stuff because I think that won't work on a Mac. And then finally, there isn't some sort of program that threads together my cores to create some sort of super fast 3 core system is there? The real LAST question is... over time, will dolphin have better performance because of new breakthroughs by the developing team software wise?

Problem is, Dolphin and other types of emulation simply requires a lot of lightly threaded performance (so you need to have a CPU that has fast single core performance). Dolphin cant use more than two (or sometimes 3 if you can use DSP on a separate thread, but in my experience its not the most reliable option) since spreading the work over several threads would actually give you worse performance than before (Natural Violence or one of the devs would be able to explain the details better than I could if they see this thread/post). A 400 MHz bump up wouldn't improve performance by that much, since you cant upgrade to a new architecture (Harpertown/Penryn is fairly old). In my opinion, it wouldn't be worth it to pay $180 for those CPU's. Plus, the motherboard and its chip-set isn't compatible with newer CPU's, and I don't even think Nehalem CPU's would would work in it. Also, im not sure if OCing a Xeon CPU is possible.

You wont be able to emulate anything intense (such as Super Mario Galaxy, Okami, Twilight Princes, etc) but your current rig should be able to handle quite a few lighter weight games.

So really the question to ask is: What games are you trying to play?

[RORONOA ZORO]

So right now I have Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors Harpertown/Penryn).

And I want to upgrade to: The Mac Pro "Eight Core" 3.2 (Early 2008) is powered by two 3.2 GHz Quad Core 45-nm Intel Xeon X5482 (Harpertown/Penryn) processors with 12 MB of level 2 cache per processor (each pair of cores shares 6 MB), a 128-bit SSE4 SIMD vector engine, and 1.6 GHz "64-bit dual independent frontside buses."

It's not that costly only 180$ buy it now on ebay for the 3.2 ghz. If I could find a newer version of processor compatible with my mac I would do it but I cannot find anything online that says that there is something better I can upgrade to then the 3.2ghz. Also is there some sort of program on PC that can Overclock my CPU via software. Non of that BIOS stuff because I think that won't work on a Mac. And then finally, there isn't some sort of program that threads together my cores to create some sort of super fast 3 core system is there? The real LAST question is... over time, will dolphin have better performance because of new breakthroughs by the developing team software wise?

Problem is, Dolphin and other types of emulation simply requires a lot of lightly threaded performance (so you need to have a CPU that has fast single core performance). Dolphin cant use more than two (or sometimes 3 if you can use DSP on a separate thread, but in my experience its not the most reliable option) since spreading the work over several threads would actually give you worse performance than before (Natural Violence or one of the devs would be able to explain the details better than I could if they see this thread/post). A 400 MHz bump up wouldn't improve performance by that much, since you cant upgrade to a new architecture (Harpertown/Penryn is fairly old). In my opinion, it wouldn't be worth it to pay $180 for those CPU's. Plus, the motherboard and its chip-set isn't compatible with newer CPU's, and I don't even think Nehalem CPU's would would work in it. Also, im not sure if OCing a Xeon CPU is possible.

You wont be able to emulate anything intense (such as Super Mario Galaxy, Okami, Twilight Princes, etc) but your current rig should be able to handle quite a few lighter weight games.

So really the question to ask is: What games are you trying to play?

I mostly just want a playable experience. However one interesting thing is that my rig runs twilight princess very well. My gtx 770 4gb graphics card comes tomorrow so I'll post some results once that comes. I'm hopping that upgrading to that card from my current AMD radeon 256mb card from 2008 will be noticeable. In Twilight princess the fps got low sometimes but the VPS was fairly good. Also I realized that I wasn't running my computer at High Performance. But yeah what I'm looking for in this experience is just to be able to play and beat games. I just want them playable. I'll post my results once my graphics card comes.

[pauldacheez]

For what it's worth, ZTP actually might prefer AMD cards on OS X:

<kode54> verdict in from testing
<kode54> if anyone asks what video card to buy for dolphin if they’re sporting a hackintosh, I recommend radeon 7xxx or R9 270X or 280X
<kode54> at least trying to run Twilight Princess GCN, 270X runs it full speed indoors, dungeons, towns, and about 70-80% on the overworld
<kode54> whereas a GTX 670 gets similar performance in the same machine in Windows and Linux, but is bottlenecked horribly running Dolphin on OS X
<kode54> runs some games even better
<kode54> but the drivers perform horribly in that one case
<kode54> never mind that it also has horrid OpenCL performance
<MaJoR1> kode54: that's not really a fair comparison
<kode54> I know
<kode54> but it’s all I’ve got on hand
<MaJoR1> so why the recommendation based on such limited testing?
<MaJoR1> with Mac OSX I would think driver support would be more important (see every OSX issue on the forum ever)
<kode54> they’re gravitating towards AMD again, so I guess it figures that they’re putting some effort into those drivers right now
<kode54> 7xxx support is fairly recent
<kode54> I guess, disregard my recommendation
<kode54> needs more serious testing by someone who cares enough to put weight into buying recommendations