(04-06-2014, 05:52 AM)ThorhiantheUltimate Wrote:(04-06-2014, 04:55 AM)RORONOA ZORO Wrote: 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.