Can't get it to run games fast enough.

[RADcookie]

I am very disappointed. I tried Conduit 2 and Rayman Origins and can't get either to run as fast as on the Wii. Conduit is basically unplayable, and Rayman is like at 1/2 speed. It seems like the emulator does not do a good job of maximizing the use of multi-core processors. I am new to this whole thing and have not overclocked anything on my system. Win 7 x64 on AMD FX8150 3.6 Ghz 8 core with 4x 4Gb of Patriot DDR3 RAM and a GTX 760 GPU. Any ideas? Seems like I need a massive speedup and don't see where the bottle neck is. System works great on Battlefield 3, etc. I understand emulation is a totally different animal, but thought I would have better luck than this. Are any significant changes/revisions in store that will improve this for me?

[Shonumi]

' Wrote:It seems like the emulator does not do a good job of maximizing the use of multi-core processors.

That's because the process of emulating the GC/Wii is not easily broken up into many major threads. Dolphin will at most use 3 major threads to do a significant portion of its processing, one thread to emulate each of the following GC/Wii components: CPU, GPU, and DSP. Normally, unless you select DSP on Dedicated thread, Dolphin will not use another thread to emulate the DSP, so with its default settings, it's a dual-core application. DSP on Dedicated thread is only recommended for LLE audio, so just ignore it for now since you're interested in speed (which is what HLE audio is for, and it doesn't really benefit from DSP on Dedicated Thread.

Sorry for spewing out terminology at you, but tl;dr, Dolphin isn't designed to significantly utilize more than three cores. Again, this is due to the nature of what's being emulated. Certain real-life tasks are good candidates for multi-threading (photo/video processing, encryption, compression, etc), but others aren't. Dolphin is one of them. This has been discussed extensively beforehand here on the forums; google or use the forum search if you're interested in the technical details. See the FAQ for a shortened explanation: https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/faq/#couldnt-dolphin-use-more-my-cpu-cores-go-faster

Anyway, Dolphin needs a few good, fast cores with high single-threaded IPC (Instructions Per Clock). The AMD FX series of CPUs, unfortunately, does not have a high enough IPC for Dolphin without serious overclocking. We've done benchmarks to prove this sort of phenomenon; you can have a look for yourself here: https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-the-legend-of-zelda-the-wind-waker-cpu-benchmark FX CPUs need to OC fairly high just to match their non-OCed Intel counterparts. The short story is that your CPU isn't particularly strong for Dolphin without overclocking, and even when overclocked, it won't reach fullspeed in a number of demanding games. This isn't Dolphin's fault; Dolphin can't be "optimized" for FX CPUs as much as it can't be optimized for i5s and i7s. This is just the different natures of the hardware, not the software.

Digressing, what can you do to get the speed up? Well, overclocking is the obvious. Dolphin is a beastly emulator, perhaps the most beastly of them all. Don't underestimate how strong a CPU needs to be to effectively run it and certain games. Try hitting around 4.0GHz and see if things improve there. If not, come back to us and post screenshots of your settings, and we'll try to help you from there.

[RADcookie]

Thank you for the feedback. I suspected that it was the CPU limitation after reading about optimizing settings and playing with them. Guess I will learn how to overclock and try again. Is there an easy upgrade I can make by replacing my FX8150 with a better AM3+ cpu? Or is this just an AMD limitation?

[ExtremeDude2]

AMD tends to be much worse then intel clock-for-clock

[delroth]

Yep. Look at this to see how terrible AMD is at CPUs: http://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-CPU-Benchmark-designed-for-PCSX2-based-on-FFX-2