CPU or Graphics bottleneck?

[Sankeyao]

Hi Dolphin community,

After upgrading my pc exactly a year ago, I've decided to try running Dolphin again (last time I tried running it was with a miserable little Intel 2ghz dual core).

The main game I'm trying to run is SMG1, which has the infamous unlooping music issue. After trying various configs posted by other users, DSP LLE is still running quite interestingly in terms of performance/fps.


When running, my cpu stays at around 70-80% in all 4 cores. This is quite profound to me, as it doesn't seem to waver depending on what part of the map the ingame camera is looking at (i.e. constant 60fps looking towards sky vs stuttering 30 fps looking towards main area of the map). The temperature of the cpu doesn't exceed 47 Celsius either, which is far, far below the max temperature threshold the cpu can withstand.

Meanwhile, the graphics card, it sits very comfortable at 30-35% usage at most and doesn't seem to need pushing itself any harder, even if the ingame camera points towards the centre of the map and causing the fps to bomb out. This appears to me as a graphics bottleneck, as the more objects on screen there are the more laggy Dolphin runs...but gpu still stays at 35% usage :/


My question is, what is bottlenecking what for SMG1? Is it really a cpu bottleneck even if the cpu only caps out at 80%?

Additional Info:
PC Specs:
i5-3570 locked @ 3.4ghz
gtx 670
8gb ram
720W PSU

Running Dolphin fullscreen@1680x1050, internal resolution@ 3x(1920x1050), no anti-aliasing

[admin89]

You have a CPU bottleneck . The unlocked "k" version is recommended for demanding games , you will need higher clock speed (4.4GHz) than the default factory clock (3.4GHz)
a GTX 660 can handle up to 4x Internal Resolution , no AA , 16x AF . GTX 670 should be more powerful than that unless ....
_Your GPU was not perform at maximum performance ( not maximum usage but maximum GPU clock speed) . In other word , your GPU was at idle / 2D mode
Use Nvidia Inspector to check GPU clock speed when Dolphin is running . Make sure you set "prefer maximum performance" via Nvidia Control Panel (add Dolphin.exe to the list first)
Also use Realtemp to check CPU clock speed when Dolphin is running . Make sure your CPU doesn't underclock itself

[Sankeyao]

Rightio:

cpu is at 3.6ghz and gpu is at 1019hz when Dolphin is running, prefer maximum performance - high performance plan etc

Well, cpu bottleneck it is then, though I wish it used at least 90% of the cores instead of 60%. It seems like the cpu has wasted potential.

[admin89]

Dolphin is a dual core application ...That's why Dolphin is so demanding on CPU side

[Sankeyao]

What are the third and fourth cores used for if its a dual core application? Or does dual core application not actually mean 'only uses 2 cores'.

[Anti-Ultimate]

Windows loads the work onto all cores using magic.

A third core can be used when activating "DSP LLE on Thread" which once again uses magic.

[NaturalViolence]

It's not magic, it's science. Computer science.

[pauldacheez]

Since nobody else bothered mentioning it: OpenGL with Vertex Streaming Hack checked (or even when unchecked on latest builds) is *much* faster than the default D3D backend.

[Sankeyao]

k thanks for the replies guys. I guess I'll just wait another 3-4 years for a better performance-per-thread cpu or get a Wii U for semi-hd fun. Or if miraculously someone decides to get the HLE plugin is tweaked to fix the audio.

[pauldacheez]

If you had a 3570K, you could easily overclock it enough to run SMG at full speed with LLE, as many other Dolphin users do. (Also see my above suggestion – despite being a seemingly GPU-centric fix, it helps more on the CPU side than you'd expect.)