(10-21-2015, 01:14 AM)kirbypuff Wrote:(10-19-2015, 01:54 AM)Anti-Ultimate Wrote: This is so wrong, I'm not even gonna bother to explain.
There's nothing wrong with that post. Just some minor inaccuracies which are addressed in this post.
What I wanted to say is you'll get a noticeable performance boost in Dolphin by "downgrading" from a current gen. AMD GPU to a previous generation AMD GPU. Strange, but true.
For example, replacing a much better R9 285 (or R9 270X) GPU with a mediocre HD6850 gives you a ~20% performance boost in NSMB at 1xIR (220fps -> 260fps) and up to 2x performance in text/logo screens of other titles (e.g. 1100fps -> 2100fps).
That's with the latest "GCN-optimized" drivers (15.10 Beta).
Older AMD GPUs have more mature (optimized) drivers with less overhead and an architecture that's more efficient for graphics (but less efficient for compute).
Dolphin doesn't use OpenCL or compute shaders, so compute performance is not that important.
But older AMD GPUs still have *exceptional* integer processing performance, which Dolphin really needs.
Older generation videocardss (e.g. HD5000 series) also don't have any of those *advanced* (smart) power-saving features. This means when fully stressed, they don't switch rapidly through different clockspeeds / power states to save power. This is a good thing, because these quick power state changes introduce nasty microstutter and/or performance issues.
And finally, they also consume the same (or even less) power at idle as current gen. cards, because their GPUs and VRAM run at much lower clockspeeds (100/150 instead of 300/300 like current-gen GPUs).
While this may or may not be true, no one on this thread was looking for performance tips. If you have some ideas (hair-brain or otherwise) on Zen's performance on Dolphin, I'd be interested to know what you think. If not, then I respectfully ask you to refrain from going too far off topic. Thank you.