Advice on configuring my new PC, please

**AnyOldName3** · 10-16-2013, 01:19 AM **#21**

You should be about the same as mine, as Dolphin doesn't really make use of any of the features unique to i7s.

dh2005 · 10-16-2013, 01:33 AM **#22**

(10-16-2013, 01:19 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: You should be about the same as mine, as Dolphin doesn't really make use of any of the features unique to i7s.

I see. And how is your experience of running Dolphin, in general? Do you run into many high-profile games that don't run smoothly?

**AnyOldName3** · 10-16-2013, 02:55 AM **#23**

Out of all the games I've actually played since I got this CPU, they've both worked. One was tLoZ Wind Waker, though, and I play that on anything (read mediocre/crappy college computers, the computers of people who don't realise that a 2.5GHz Pentium D isn't 5/6 as good as a 3GHz Hawell i5) with a portable version of Dolphin.

dh2005 · 10-16-2013, 03:04 AM **#24**

(10-16-2013, 02:55 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: Out of all the games I've actually played since I got this CPU, they've both worked. One was tLoZ Wind Waker, though, and I play that on anything (read mediocre/crappy college computers, the computers of people who don't realise that a 2.5GHz Pentium D isn't 5/6 as good as a 3GHz Hawell i5) with a portable version of Dolphin.

Well, my experience so far runs to Super Monkey Ball - which flies - and Metroid Prime - which, thanks to the advice of others in this thread, now looks to be running at a solid 60-plus frames per second.

You tell me that Super Mario Galaxy is working nicely for you also, yes? I understand from my reading that Metroid Prime and Mario Galaxy are among the most testing games, so I suppose we have reasons to be hopeful...

dh2005 · 10-16-2013, 07:25 AM **#25**

Okay... so, apparently, all I had to do was press Tab.

[facepalm]

I don't remember pressing it in the first place to 'break' it, though. Why could that have happened, I wonder.

Never mind. Back to testing...

... so, umm, yeah. Looks like I was far too confident about the performance of Metroid Prime. It ran seamlessly until the space station started blowing-up around me, but it then started to creak a little bit. It was playable, but it was definitely intrusive.

Hmm. What to change next...?

dh2005 · 10-17-2013, 09:00 PM **#26**

God-damnit, Metroid Prime is demanding...

... to make the whole of the 'first level' (i.e. clearing the space station and getting to the planet surface) completely smooth, I've had to drop the IR to x2 and switch-off the anti-aliasing completely. Still looks good, don't get me wrong, but it's kinda galling to lose all that prettiness...!!!

Is this a common experience? I realise that my CPU isn't top-of-the-range - but my graphics card is (when last I checked... another six cards have probably come out since the end of Septemeber!), and I was expecting to be able to drive the settings slightly harder than that.

Is it simply that Metroid Prime has monstrous power-needs? Is anybody, anywhere getting a smooth 60fps with superior settings?

**pauldacheez** · 10-19-2013, 11:35 AM **#27**

The 780 *should* be doing fucking flawlessly. It's a single-GPU card (unlike the 690; Dolphin can't use a second GPU, thus you don't get any help from a dual-GPU card or an SLI/Crossfire setup), and it's close enough to the GTX Titan that I don't see how the hell it could possibly be having a problem with little ol' Dolphin. Maybe (as is usual with EVERY FUCKING GPU THESE DAYS) it's dropping to idle too often? Try forcing Dolphin to a high-performance profile in your Nvidia driver settings.

***Shonumi*** · 10-19-2013, 11:51 AM **#28**

MP has drops for everyone. It's always been like that, and the current/best hardware still isn't enough. Just look up into the rain on Tallon IV with OpenGL. I'm pretty sure that Metroid Prime is GPU bottlenecked in a lot of places, none of which is helped by EFB2RAM.

dh2005 · 10-20-2013, 07:00 PM **#29**

(10-19-2013, 11:51 AM)Shonumi Wrote: MP has drops for everyone. It's always been like that, and the current/best hardware still isn't enough. Just look up into the rain on Tallon IV with OpenGL. I'm pretty sure that Metroid Prime is GPU bottlenecked in a lot of places, none of which is helped by EFB2RAM.

True, though I would like to update this thread with some news.

Even though I'd set my graphics driver to default to "Prefer Maximum Performance", and set Dolphin to obey the defaults of my graphics card, it wasn't doing so. When I went into Dolphin's individual profile within my driver software and set it to "Prefer Maximum Performance", the GTX 780 showed me what it was made of...

... and the GTX 780 is made of pure, elemental GoesFast. Just to amuse myself I played the first level of Metroid Prime last night with with maximum texture quality, maximum IR, maximum AA, V-Sync, Per-Pixel Lighting, Safe Texture Cache, DSP LLE on a separate thread, and probably another few obnoxious settings that I can't remember right now - and it ran well. The video dropped a few frames once or twice, but it never locked-up, and the sound never dropped out. It was entirely playable.

But yes, of course, looking up into the rain on Tallon's surface made everything creak like shit. I expected this, and I'm not disappointed. I now feel like my graphics card is doing what it's supposed to be doing. That was all that bothered me, previously.

Thanks, everyone, for your help.