Does Dolphin load games fully into memory?

gimme_vidyagames · 07-12-2016, 02:09 PM #1

Hi guys. I have a quick question - when you load a game in Dolphin, does the game load completely into memory, or does the emulator continue reading the iso from the hard disk during gameplay?
I ask because I am planning on setting up a network share on my local network which will host game files, and the computer that runs the emulator will just load them from the network. I want to make sure that I won't have any weird issues after the game loads.
So is it a constant I/O stream, or does the emulator just put games into RAM for the duration of play?
Thanks.

Kurausukun · (This post was last modified: 07-12-2016, 02:52 PM by Kurausukun.)

Dolphin definitely does not put the entire game into RAM for the duration of play since that would absolutely devour most users' RAM considering games can be up to 7.93GB in size. Theoretically, Dolphin loads games the exact same way a Wii would, though there are slight differences.

**JosJuice** · 07-12-2016, 06:52 PM #3

Like Kurausukun says, Dolphin will read from the disk every now and then, not load everything into RAM. Loading the game over a local network won't lead to any weird issues. At worst, you'll get worse performance, but I'm hoping that won't happen.

gimme_vidyagames · 07-12-2016, 11:41 PM #4

Alright. I may have to copy my games to the local machine then. I'll see what the performance is like once I build my system though. Hopefully it shouldn't be too bad with a 10mb/s connection. If nothing else, it'll be a valid excuse to upgrade to a gigabit file server.

Anthe · 07-13-2016, 12:03 AM #5

I run all my games off the network. I have 0 trouble whatsoever.

**JosJuice** · (This post was last modified: 07-13-2016, 12:07 AM by JosJuice.)

(07-12-2016, 11:41 PM)gimme_vidyagames Wrote: Alright. I may have to copy my games to the local machine then. I'll see what the performance is like once I build my system though. Hopefully it shouldn't be too bad with a 10mb/s connection. If nothing else, it'll be a valid excuse to upgrade to a gigabit file server.

10 megabytes per second should work well, though I haven't tested it myself. But if it's 10 megabit per second, I doubt that you will be able to run games at full speed while they're loading things.