Can I run these games in 1080p on i7 2600 + Radeon 7970 ?

[Skywolf]

Just tried it out on my good old i5 2500k (which is still my daily driver). Keep in mind it's still OC'd to 4.3 Ghz but I just tried SMG without the speed limiter. Haven't seen a moment the game dropped below 120fps using a GTX 1060. I heard AMD's drivers do use a bit more CPU power than Nvidia's though. But even with that I doubt your system is half as fast as mine.

Really amazing how far Dolphin has come.

[wonderboy]

(08-18-2018, 03:13 AM)JonnyH Wrote: I only recently replaced my i7 2600x - though that did overclock very well, so it had a bit more headroom, it was still churning through AAA titles at good speed until this year. Really, it shows how stagnant Intel have been in many respects. Only this year have they really added anything of note - finally moving past 4 cores.

I agree, Ive seen decent overclocked i7 2600ks perform within 10-20 fps of intels flagship cpus in modern games, its still a beast! Im keen to see how many cores the new intel chips are gonna have considering Ryzens massive core count. Would be interesting to see if they can really push the clocks to record levels as well.

[wonderboy]

(08-18-2018, 05:41 AM)Skywolf Wrote: Just tried it out on my good old i5 2500k (which is still my daily driver). Keep in mind it's still OC'd to 4.3 Ghz but I just tried SMG without the speed limiter. Haven't seen a moment the game dropped below 120fps using a GTX 1060. I heard AMD's drivers do use a bit more CPU power than Nvidia's though. But even with that I doubt your system is half as fast as mine.

Really amazing how far Dolphin has come.

I just checked and the boost clock on a 2600 is 3800mhz and is about 12% slower than your i5 overclock@ 4300mhz which in theory might then mean I get about 100fps (120-12%). The 7970 ghz edition is reported to be about 35% slower than a gtx 1060 6gb (techpowerup.com) so if you do an average of these 2 factors on your 120fps performance you get about 90fps using my system, in theory

Which for me would be fantastic for SMG as I was only hoping it could hit a locked 60fps! And this being one of the more demanding dolphin games, it might mean I could get 60pfs 1080p on most other games I hope? Did you run your SMG in 1080p when you were getting 120fps?

[Skywolf]

1080p yes. With ubershaders disabled to avoid the GPU from being a bottleneck. And 60fps is all you need as gamespeed is tied to framerate. SMG is a 60fps title so running it at that means it runs at fullspeed. Anything above that just speeds up the game.

Not sure about that 3.8Ghz boost clock. That might just be only on a single core but can't find any info about that. But even at the base 3.4 you should be fine.

And your GPU won't be a factor in this unless you want to run Synchronous Ubershaders. My 1060 reached "only" ~90 fps in SMG with it on to give an indication of how taxing that is on your GPU. (Without it 120fps was reached without running at 100% utilization meaning we were CPU limited). I ran SMG back in the day using a Radeon HD 6870 and even that thing didn't break a sweat at 60fps 1080p.

Edit: Got curious and clocked my i5 back to its base 3.3 Ghz (with no turbo boost) and tested the three knows demanding games I have in my collection:

Super Mario Galaxy: ~100fps at same spot OC'd I got 120

Metroid Prime at Chozo Main Plaza: ~100fps with 16:9 culling fix enabled. Might get a bit higher if running at 4:3.

F-zero GX: have seen drops during races to ~70fps. Only title I would say that got dangerously close to below 60fps and might stutter during some really demanding moments. (Only tested Mute City and title screen).

[wonderboy]

(08-19-2018, 08:29 PM)Skywolf Wrote: 1080p yes. With ubershaders disabled to avoid the GPU from being a bottleneck. And 60fps is all you need as gamespeed is tied to framerate. SMG is a 60fps title so running it at that means it runs at fullspeed. Anything above that just speeds up the game.

Not sure about that 3.8Ghz boost clock. That might just be only on a single core but can't find any info about that. But even at the base 3.4 you should be fine.

And your GPU won't be a factor in this unless you want to run Synchronous Ubershaders. My 1060 reached "only" ~90 fps in SMG with it on to give an indication of how taxing that is on your GPU. (Without it 120fps was reached without running at 100% utilization meaning we were CPU limited). I ran SMG back in the day using a Radeon HD 6870 and even that thing didn't break a sweat at 60fps 1080p.

Edit: Got curious and clocked my i5 back to its base 3.3 Ghz (with no turbo boost) and tested the three knows demanding games I have in my collection:

Super Mario Galaxy: ~100fps at same spot OC'd I got 120

Metroid Prime at Chozo Main Plaza: ~100fps with 16:9 culling fix enabled. Might get a bit higher if running at 4:3.

F-zero GX: have seen drops during races to ~70fps. Only title I would say that got dangerously close to below 60fps and might stutter during some really demanding moments. (Only tested Mute City and title screen).

Thanks for you detailed reply Skywolf! Im learning a lot thanks to your feedback. Just read about ubershaders and once again Im very impressed with the hard work and inovation being done to perfect dolphin. Also, it turns out you were right about the boost clock, it is only on one core.

But as you indicated thanks to your stock clock test I will be able to get 60fps at 1080p even on demanding titles like SMG, not sure how much faster a 7970 is than your old 6870 but it would probably be a decent amount so this looks very promising. And given that running uber shaders on your stock i5 and gtx1060 combo on SMG yields about 90fps, I think I might be able to run ubershaders and maybe still get a stable 60fps on SMG and hopefully then some other games too.

Thanks for testing f zero, this is one ot my favourite games, looks like it might be a bit tough for me to run but at least i have a heads up, cheers.

Do you know if running hd texture packs at 1080p gives as big a hit to performance as ubershaders or is it less?

Thanks again for your help Skywolf

[Skywolf]

On a 7970 I doubt HD textures would affect performance much. Although from the one time I tried the stuttering was unplayable (which might vary from a game to game basis and might have been caused by my 6870 having only 1gb of vram). I recommend caching the textures in RAM but this requires atleast 16GB of it for most texture packs.

According to this list your GPU scores about 5200 points. Mine scores almost 9000. Not sure if the scoring system they use scales linearly with performance but if it does then your GPU is about 40% slower than mine. Which might sound bad but a 6870 scores only 2600 points. So even a card half as slow as yours could run Dolphin with no issues (albeit with no ubershaders as those didn't exist back then).

Keep in mind though that each GPU is different and that some are faster in certain aspects than others. So wether ubershaders will run at fullspeed on your system will be something you have to just try. You can always use Asynchronous shader caching with Ubershaders (Hybrid was what is was called before) which should give you about the same experience but with drastically less GPU requirements.

[wonderboy]

(08-20-2018, 07:38 AM)Skywolf Wrote: On a 7970 I doubt HD textures would affect performance much. Although from the one time I tried the stuttering was unplayable (which might vary from a game to game basis and might have been caused by my 6870 having only 1gb of vram). I recommend caching the textures in RAM but this requires atleast 16GB of it for most texture packs.

According to this list your GPU scores about 5200 points. Mine scores almost 9000. Not sure if the scoring system they use scales linearly with performance but if it does then your GPU is about 40% slower than mine. Which might sound bad but a 6870 scores only 2600 points. So even a card half as slow as yours could run Dolphin with no issues (albeit with no ubershaders as those didn't exist back then).

Keep in mind though that each GPU is different and that some are faster in certain aspects than others. So wether ubershaders will run at fullspeed on your system will be something you have to just try. You can always use Asynchronous shader caching with Ubershaders (Hybrid was what is was called before) which should give you about the same experience but with drastically less GPU requirements.

That is good to hear hd texture packs dont impact performance as much as I thought, I only have 8gb ram atm but hopefully it might still work okay and I can add more for pretty cheap.

Thankyou for feedback on my card vs your new and old gpus, seems like anything within the last 6 or 7 years with 1 Gb or better will run Dolphin well, which is a nice surprise.

Yeah it seems really difficult to actually predict what a given system will run like with different Dolphin settings so I will have to wait and see how things go when I put my the new htpc together. But you have done as good as a person could do to give me an idea of what I can expect and I really appreciate this. Thanks also for your tip on hybrid ubershaders, I will be sure to give this a try.

Skywolf you are a champion 8

[emu82]

(08-19-2018, 12:59 AM)wonderboy Wrote: Which for me would be fantastic for SMG as I was only hoping it could hit a locked 60fps! And this being one of the more demanding dolphin games, it might mean I could get 60pfs 1080p on most other games I hope? Did you run your SMG in 1080p when you were getting 120fps?

Just throwing this in here, I discovered a few days ago that SMG runs at 60 fps on my CPU from 2009 (Phenom II overclocked to 4 Ghz), I've collected the first five stars and very occasionally noticed a short drop from 60 to 55 fps, which could've been a GPU bottleneck though.

So in essence, it's basically perfect, 1080p, only MSAA though (not SSAA), but I'm really happy that I can run it because I am not playing any games newer than Far Cry 4 at the moment and therefore not planning on upgrading my system soon.

Dolphin has come a long way as SMG used to run MUCH slower on the same processor.