Computer weak?

10-02-2014, 01:05 PM #1

I was trying to get Dolphin working on my sister's computer. The specs are:

AMD Athlon 245e 2.9Ghz
2GB DDR3
ATI HD 4670 1GB DDR3 PCIE
Windows XP

The thing is the performance is very difficult to meassure. It's not the same for all games. It's more like you never know if it will be slow or not. So far I have tried these games:

1-Wario World -Perfect
2-Mario Sunshine - 30Fps Very playable. Sometimes sounds get off if I played another game before playing this one
3-Mario Kart Dash - Perfect speed but music stops when it's time to loop.
4-Spyro Enter the Dragonfly - Fast slow fast slow
5-Smash Bros Melee - Starts fast then get slow fast slow fast changing speeds very unstable

I don't have Vsync on but I do have FPS limit set to auto.

Is the computer too weak or am I doing something wrong ?

**KHg8m3r** · (This post was last modified: 10-02-2014, 01:25 PM by KHg8m3r.)

Well, the CPU is on the really low end, that's about as much speed as you can expect.

But what's really holding you back is using Windows XP, cause you can't get the latest dev builds since XP and 32-bit support was dropped, and going up to Windows 7 64 bit will need more RAM (at least 4 GB)

I recommend upgrading the PC. Was it a prebuilt system, or one that somebody built themself?

10-04-2014, 01:49 AM #3

I built this PC for her. It wasn't built specifically for this task. This is more of an afterthought.

What is the latest version ? I went to the site and got version 4.x . That's not the latest ? I have a question. Will using a very old version improve speed ? Like using a version from before Wii was added ?

***Shonumi*** · 10-04-2014, 01:53 AM #4

4.0, 4.0.1, and 4.0.2 are stable builds. KHg8m3r meant the very latest development builds. The latest (as of this writing) is 4.0-3502. These are much faster than the stable builds.

**KHg8m3r** · 10-04-2014, 02:15 AM #5

However, he can't use the latest dev build because the computer is running XP. The last dev build with 32 bit support was 4.0-1609 https://dolphin-emu.org/download/dev/ada6434b8ef8794bb6c7476726fb014299bbdd06/

How long ago did you build this computer? Cause you should really upgrade the motherboard and CPU to something Haswell. If you don't have much to spend, get the G3258 and overclock to 4.5-4.7, and it will perform the same as the i5-4690k/i7-4790k at the same clock speed (for dolphin). And it will perform way better than Athalon x2 in everything else.