AMD Phenom II X2 560 CPU - good enough ?

[YellowWii]

It's 4 years old, but my PC specs are as follows:

CPU: AMD Phenom II X2 560
Video card: Sapphire HD 7850 - 2GBytes RAM
Motherboard: ASUS M4A88TD-V EVO USB3 (AM3 CPU socket)
RAM: 4 GBytes
Operating System: Ubuntu 13.04 64-bit (not yet installed, hence this post)

I know the CPU isn't great - I was thinking of upgrading it to the AMD Phenom II X6 1100T (if I could find one at a reasonable price) as I can't afford to upgrade both the motherboard and the CPU

I could overclock my existing CPU of course or even enable more of the cores.

However, given my current config, will any games run at full speed with full sound emulation? Wii Sports perhaps?

How about Super Mario Galaxy? Or will I experience massive slowdowns?

I'd be using one of the recent dev versions of Dolphin.

Thanks

[KHg8m3r]

If you overclock, more games will be playable. You'll just have to test out Super Mario Galaxy, as it is pretty CPU and GPU intensive. I don't know if you'll be able to get fullspeed, but it doesn't hurt to try it out

[YellowWii]

Thanks. Once I get Ubuntu installed I'll try it and report back here.

[KHg8m3r]

Just remember, don't expect miracles

[YellowWii]

Oh, i won't. No worries there.

[kirbypuff]

#1: CPU performance: Go to this thread: https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-new-dolphin-cpu-benchmark-no-game-required , download the Dolphin benchmark, run it and post your results here.

#2: GPU performance: Your GPU, the Radeon HD7850 is good for up to 7xIR (your previous GPU, the HD6850 was good for 6x). That's on Windows with the Direct3D backend.
Be aware that the OpenGL backend is much slower than Direct3D on AMD GPUs.
On Linux (Ubuntu), the the OpenGL backend performance is even worse (OpenGL on Windows is still faster)

#3: You should always use the latest dev version for best performance and accuracy.

[YellowWii]

Good point about having to use OpenGL under Linux. Had forgotten about that.

[NaturalViolence]

kirbypuff Wrote:#2: GPU performance: Your GPU, the Radeon HD7850 is good for up to 7xIR (your previous GPU, the HD6850 was good for 6x).

What do you base this on?

[Shonumi]

kirbypuff Wrote:On Linux (Ubuntu), the the OpenGL backend performance is even worse (OpenGL on Windows is still faster)

Careful how you say that. As a general statement, that most certainly is not true for all GPUs and drivers (I have verified this on my system, Linux + OGL runs as fast or faster than Windows + OGL). It's really not something you can have a blanket statement about, especially since there are a lot more factors that can influence Linux performance than on the Windows side of things (distro, kernel, drivers, distance from the sun). It's really something that has to be decided on a case-by-case basis, since user reports have been all across the board in this regard. The only thing I will say that's pretty much established currently is that the OSS drivers for either AMD or Nvidia are inferior to the proprietary drivers, performance wise. Intel performance is actually pretty good since Intel actually does work on MESA and seems to care about Linux.

[kirbypuff]

(11-06-2014, 11:51 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: What do you base this on?

The dkcr_furious_fire_extreme_paused_sress_test (the most demanding EFB->Texture GPU benchmark EVER)

(11-06-2014, 12:04 PM)Shonumi Wrote: Careful how you say that. As a general statement, that most certainly is not true for all GPUs and drivers (I have verified this on my system, Linux + OGL runs as fast or faster than Windows + OGL). It's really not something you can have a blanket statement about, especially since there are a lot more factors that can influence Linux performance than on the Windows side of things (distro, kernel, drivers, distance from the sun). It's really something that has to be decided on a case-by-case basis, since user reports have been all across the board in this regard. The only thing I will say that's pretty much established currently is that the OSS drivers for either AMD or Nvidia are inferior to the proprietary drivers, performance wise. Intel performance is actually pretty good since Intel actually does work on MESA and seems to care about Linux.

AMD Catalyst: OpenGL is known to perform a bit worse on Ubuntu Linux than on Windows on AMD GPUs. It has been like this for a long time.

NVIDIA Forceware: Recent benchmarks by some sites have also revealed some surprising results - OpenGL on Windows is a bit faster than on the most popular Linux distros on NVIDIA GPUs as well.