Dolphin PC buying guide

[RaptorZX3]

@Vince4587: be prepared to buy 1 good USB fan platform to cool this thing, gaming laptops tend to heat a lot (it's very cramped inside these things, so heat is a lot harder to evacuate), so helping with external cooling is always good.

But yes, i think it should be awesome, but very expensive also, but as you said, you have the budget for it. You should pick up Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, OEM version cost about 100$ i think.

Also, the Laptop version of the i7 in this laptop is slower than the real i7 series i think, maybe around the same performance as my i5 750 here, not sure.

[Clusta]

You can expect slightly better results than this - Asus Rog G511J 3D Vision benchmark

I don't want to scare you away from 3D, as a lot of people seem to like it. I want to be clear on the results you would get in terms of gaming. The 740qm might not be enough as it only hits 2.9Ghz in turbo mode. 920 or 940 puts you in the 3.2 -3.3 range which should do well for most games.

[NaturalViolence]

Quote:Even if peoples tell you that anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic is very little influence on performance, i tend to not listen to them. Dolphin is what it is, an emulator, it's not perfect and you never know when your framerate will drop for X reason. And as of now, the Anti-aliasing setting still say "This make the rendered picture less blocky but also heavily decreases performance".

Better safe than sorry, and remember, if you set it for better performance, that mean you're ironing out all the "little decrease on performance" settings so you have to find the perfect balance so all games should work great without any framerate drop, OR don't take any chance and set it on the speed side, without much loss of graphics quality.

AA will have a huge performance hit if your pixel fillrate is not high enough. AF on the other hand should not decrease performance at all on virtually any gpu made in the last 5 years, especially in dolphin. Your gpu would have to be so bad that it wouldn't be capable of decent speed in any game anyways, even without AF.

[FantaXP7]

Natural Violence,

Too bad on the no auto pair, that was actually what I meant. I certainly hope someone will be able to find a work around once day.

As far as graphics settings,
AF: 4x
AA: none
using v-sync
pixel lighting checked
pixel depth checked
efp scale checked
load native mipmaps checked

scaling integral
enable cpu access checked

using direct3d9

emulate formate changes checked

copy enabled RAM checked

sorry if that was too much info, wasn't sure how much was relevant.

Thanks

[RaptorZX3]

uncheck v-sync, i always had bad performance with this on, and frankly, it doesn't improve anything graphically, you will only see no "image tearing".

for other settings such as "emulate format changes" and "copy enabled RAM", it depend on games and what kind of settings they use (or what they run better on).

For example, with Mario Kart Wii, it run much better with "emulate format changes" and "enable CPU access" unchecked, and "EFB Copy to Texture" with Scale being Fractional, and disabling fog, and unchecking "Enable Audio Throttle" might help also. At least it run much better that way for me, but i still experience slowdowns sometimes, maybe because the emulator still need work on this game (and other games using these settings?)

[NaturalViolence]

(02-10-2011, 10:02 AM)FantaXP7 Wrote: Natural Violence,

Too bad on the no auto pair, that was actually what I meant. I certainly hope someone will be able to find a work around once day.

As far as graphics settings,
AF: 4x
AA: none
using v-sync
pixel lighting checked
pixel depth checked
efp scale checked
load native mipmaps checked

scaling integral
enable cpu access checked

using direct3d9

emulate formate changes checked

copy enabled RAM checked

sorry if that was too much info, wasn't sure how much was relevant.

Thanks

Turn off pixel lighting and pixel depth. Both are a waste of gpu resources. Pixel depth is only needed in a few games and pixel lighting isn't needed in any game. Turn off emulate format changes, it can cause significant slowdowns, especially with high efb scales, and it usually causes more problems than it fixes. Set efb copy to texture in the games where you don't need it to be set to ram (most games). Set the scale to fractional. That should fix it.

I would also turn on lock threads to cores, turn off audio throttle, turn on use fps for limiting. You don't need to with that awesome cpu, but if you ever run into slowdowns related to cpu or dsp emulation it will help.

Quote:uncheck v-sync, i always had bad performance with this on

Weird. v-sync should have no performance hit at all unless you've set your efb scale/SSAA scale way too high for your gpu.

[RaptorZX3]

i just don't take many chance performance-wise. V-sync basically take more GPU and/or CPU only to render 2 frames so it wouldn't show any tearing. So gaming-wise, if you're looking for performance all the time without any framerate drop, don't enable v-sync in ANY game, not just in Dolphin

[NaturalViolence]

Quote:V-sync basically take more GPU and/or CPU only to render 2 frames so it wouldn't show any tearing.

No it doesn't. All it does is sync the frontbuffer (or in this case th efb) to the backbuffer. No additional processing power is needed to do this. The only way this will have a performance hit is if your gpu was already the bottleneck before you turned it on. With your specs as long as you don't set your efb scale or SSAA scale too high you should not be encountering any drop in internal framerate at all.

Quote:performance all the time without any framerate drop, don't enable v-sync in ANY game, not just in Dolphin

If you can pull framerates >80fps all the time why not? You'll still end up with the same number of fps transmitted to the monitor.

[FantaXP7]

(02-10-2011, 02:07 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote:

(02-10-2011, 10:02 AM)FantaXP7 Wrote: Natural Violence,

Too bad on the no auto pair, that was actually what I meant. I certainly hope someone will be able to find a work around once day.

As far as graphics settings,
AF: 4x
AA: none
using v-sync
pixel lighting checked
pixel depth checked
efp scale checked
load native mipmaps checked

scaling integral
enable cpu access checked

using direct3d9

emulate formate changes checked

copy enabled RAM checked

sorry if that was too much info, wasn't sure how much was relevant.

Thanks

Turn off pixel lighting and pixel depth. Both are a waste of gpu resources. Pixel depth is only needed in a few games and pixel lighting isn't needed in any game. Turn off emulate format changes, it can cause significant slowdowns, especially with high efb scales, and it usually causes more problems than it fixes. Set efb copy to texture in the games where you don't need it to be set to ram (most games). Set the scale to fractional. That should fix it.

I would also turn on lock threads to cores, turn off audio throttle, turn on use fps for limiting. You don't need to with that awesome cpu, but if you ever run into slowdowns related to cpu or dsp emulation it will help.

Quote:uncheck v-sync, i always had bad performance with this on

Weird. v-sync should have no performance hit at all unless you've set your efb scale/SSAA scale way too high for your gpu.

Awesome awesome awesome!

Running beautifully now.

Thanks

[Seix]

First of all, hi I'm new in here and this is mi first post.
Well, I am thinking of buy a new computer because the one that I have is almost 6 years old and I can't play any game.
I want to buy a computer which I can play (for example) Sonic Colors but I don't have much money.
This is what i can afford:
1)AMD PHENOM II X2 550 Dual Core 3.1 Ghz - AM3
Motherboard ASUS M4A785T-M
2 Gb DDR3 1333 Mhz (Or 4 Gb if necessary)
HDD 500 Gb Serial ATA 2 - 7200 Rpm
Ati Radeon HD 4650 512 MB - 128 BIT(or 1 gb if necessary)

2)AMD ATHLON II X4 640 3.0 - AM3
Motherboard ASUS M4N68T-M LE
4 Gb DDRIII 1333 Mhz
HDD 500 Gb Serial ATA 2 - 7200 Rpm
Ati Radeon HD 4650 512 MB - 128 BIT(or 1 gb if necessary)

3)AMD PHENOM II X4 965 Quad Core 3.4 Ghz.
Motherboard ASUS M4N68T-M LE - AM3
4 Gb DDR3 1333 Mhz
HDD 500 Gb Serial ATA 2 - 7200 Rpm
Video Graphics GEFORCE 7025 . Integrated Technology

4)AMD PHENOM II X4 955 3.2 - AM3
Motherboard ASUS M4N68T-M LE
2 Gb DDRIII 1333 Mhz
HDD 500 Gb Serial ATA 2 - 7200 Rpm
Ati Radeon HD 4650 512 MB - 128 BIT(or 1 gb if necessary)

5)INTEL DUAL CORE I3 540 - 3.06 - 4M - sock 1156
Motherboard ASUS P7H55-M LX - sock 1156
Memoria DDR3 - 2 GB PC 1333 Mhz
HDD 500 Gb Serial ATA 2 - 7200 Rpm
Ati Radeon HD 4650 512 MB - 128 BIT(or 1 gb if necessary)

6)INTEL CORE 2 QUAD Q8300 - 2.50 Ghz -775
Motherboard GIGABYTE GA-G41MT-S2 - 775 - ATX2 - DDR3
4 Gb DDR3 1333 Mhz
HDD 500 Gb Serial ATA 2 - 7200 Rpm
ATI 4350 1 GB DDR2 VGA/DVI XFX pci-e

Im sorry if these are too many, but I do not know much about computers so I thought you all could help me out. Thanks in advance and sorry for the bad English (I am from Argentina).