CPU upgrade from i5-4690 to play Galaxy in 1080p with HD textures

[jettiblue]

Hi all,

I'm currently thinking of upgrading my CPU, which it is time for anyway because I use my PC also for rendering, but also to get better performance with Dolphin.

In particular I am interested in getting Mario Galaxy 1 to run silky smooth in 60fps at 1080p with the HD texture pack. With my specs (i5-4690, GTX 1070, 16GB RAM, Win 10) currently it is mainly playable but has stutters here and there (frame rate and audio chops briefly) and some levels are more strongly affected, especially the water levels, the freezing water effect in ice levels and some parts of the ghost levels. Other levels run completely smooth. The full game runs perfect in 720p, but I want 1080p. Btw, the stutters are not chache compiling since the effect is repeatable & happening each time I play the same part of the game.

So I've done my research but it seems the devil is in the details with this one so I'm asking for feedback from you guys before making a purchase decision.
As I understand it, Dolphin uses only 2 cores, so am I right to assume that I need to increase the single core speed when upgrading to get an improvement?

My current CPU i5-4690 is a 4-core with 3,5 to 3,9 GHz single core speed.  For rendering it would be a great improvement to go with an 8-core like the Ryzen 1700x, but that one has a lower single core speeds of 3,4 to 3,8. Does that mean it will be performing slower in Dolphin?

If my assumption is correct, how fast of a single core speed should I go for in an upgrade?

I'm using Dolphin 5.0-8718 (game didnt run smooth in 5.0 for some reason) with the recommended settings, DX11, ubershaders and shader compiling in full screen with 2xAA and 4xAF.

[JonnyH]

Dolphin nearly always is limited by single core performance - so you're right in saying that a ryzen 1700x would likely be at best no faster than the 4690.

I think in many apps the current ryzen core is clock-for-clock about the same performance as the haswell series from Intel (IE your current processor) - with the newer Intel series having a small advantage per clock, but only a few percent. So replacing with the current top-of-the-market Intel CPU will only give a ~20% performance boost - mostly from the increased turbo clock. While this may be enough to avoid small stutters, it's certainly unlikely to be a slam dunk.

And while you said you ran the "recommended" settings, there are still possibly a few things you can do - trying newer dolphin builds might help, make sure you don't have vsync enabled in your gpu settings, make sure you have the latest GPU drivers from the vendor website, make sure the PC is otherwise idle (and possibly even helping the windows scheduler by setting the thread affinity to otherwise idle CPUs). Also, I don't have a nvidia GPU to test with, but I think that the dx12 and vulkan backends may have lower CPU utilization - again might be worth double checking dx11 runs best for you.

Also, disabling the "dual core" option might help some things - while it sounds counterproductive, sometimes the overhead of managing the multiple threads and synchronizing the data between them is higher than the advantage of splitting it - depending on the workload and game, of course.

And that is assuming it's CPU bound - while a 1070 should have no issues at 1080p (with 'asynchronous' ubershaders), there should be /exactly/ the same stutters at the original smaller gamecube resolution and no antialiasing - it might be worth just double checking before spending any $$$

[jettiblue]

Dolphin nearly always is limited by single core performance - so you're right in saying that a ryzen 1700x would likely be at best no faster than the 4690.

I think in many apps the current ryzen core is clock-for-clock about the same performance as the haswell series from Intel (IE your current processor) - with the newer Intel series having a small advantage per clock, but only a few percent. So replacing with the current top-of-the-market Intel CPU will only give a ~20% performance boost - mostly from the increased turbo clock. While this may be enough to avoid small stutters, it's certainly unlikely to be a slam dunk.

And while you said you ran the "recommended" settings, there are still possibly a few things you can do - trying newer dolphin builds might help, make sure you don't have vsync enabled in your gpu settings, make sure you have the latest GPU drivers from the vendor website, make sure the PC is otherwise idle (and possibly even helping the windows scheduler by setting the thread affinity to otherwise idle CPUs). Also, I don't have a nvidia GPU to test with, but I think that the dx12 and vulkan backends may have lower CPU utilization - again might be worth double checking dx11 runs best for you.

Also, disabling the "dual core" option might help some things - while it sounds counterproductive, sometimes the overhead of managing the multiple threads and synchronizing the data between them is higher than the advantage of splitting it - depending on the workload and game, of course.

And that is assuming it's CPU bound - while a 1070 should have no issues at 1080p (with 'asynchronous' ubershaders), there should be /exactly/ the same stutters at the original smaller gamecube resolution and no antialiasing - it might be worth just double checking before spending any $$$

Thanks very much for your response and thoughts!

So I think I will wait for the new Ryzen 3000 series coming soon, it looks like many of the new CPUs will have base single clock speed closer to 4 GHz, which would make more sense to boost for Dolphin then. (Plus it's always best to have more modern hardware, the 1000 series is 2 years old after all).

I tried your suggestions re: settings and changing to DX12 made a huge difference in performance! There are still some minor stutters, but I can live with that for now. Will investigate further what you suggested with making sure it's coming from CPU not GPU.

Btw, Mario Galaxy 2 seems to be much better optimized as it ran nearly perfect for me already on DX11.

[Rayxzz]

I'm surprised your actually dropping in frames.
I'm using an i7 8750h 4.1GHz with a GTX 1070 and I can run SMG 1 in 8k.
Try running on Vulkan? Idk.

[jettiblue]

I'm surprised your actually dropping in frames.
I'm using an i7 8750h 4.1GHz with a GTX 1070 and I can run SMG 1 in 8k.
Try running on Vulkan? Idk.

Thanks for the suggestion, but everytime I select Vulkan in the drop-down menu Dolphin just crashes.
I tried on several development builds, same everytime..

[DJBarry004]

Thanks for the suggestion, but everytime I select Vulkan in the drop-down menu Dolphin just crashes.
I tried on several development builds, same everytime..

You probably don´t have the latest NVidia drivers / latest Vulkan RT (runtimes) installed.