Dolphin sometimes is more powerful than a real Wii?

[Xtreme2damax]

I noticed something from playing on a real Wii, that may crown Dolphin as the king in terms of performance compared to the actual hardware.

In New Super Mario Bros. The Next Levels, there is this area in World 1 - 1 that has all these Goombas, on the real Wii it slows to a crawl, but on Dolphin it's running at full speed or near full speed with efb to ram effects, 16x AF, Native mips, per pixel lighting, 1920 x 1080 resolution, and efb scaled copy.

I would of thought that the emulated hardware would have slowed down just as much as the real hardware, or worse than the real hardware. Does this mean there is the possibility for the emulator to be optimized enough to play all games better than the real hardware someday?

Here is a screenshot of the area I am talking about, this slows down to a crawl on the real hardware but runs at full speed with Dolphin.

World 9 - 8 seems to slow down as much as on the real Wii, but that's a given due to all of what is being rendered on the screen at one time, Dolphin may still be slightly faster though.

[shawnanastasio]

really, it slows down on a wii??????

[NaturalViolence]

really, it slows down on a wii??????

Of course. I am actually not surprised by this at all.

[Ocean]

Reginleiv and Harvest moon have really bad occassional screen lag on the real wii, but run smoothly on much higher graphical settings under dolphin on a PC..
So the emu is definitely doing something right

Also the fps is usually very constant in dolphin in graphically intense games, whereas on wii there is slight stutter if many animations or characters are on the screen

[ugoo]

Im not sure that means Dolphin is better or your PC is better, because you've posted the specs of your PC a couple of times Xtreme and if i remember correctly they where pretty damm good however if you where to try the same thing on something worse it probably would be worse than the Wii. Dolphin on a PC like yours would definitely be better than a real Wii but on something worse then it might not be as good as a real Wii.

[Xtreme2damax]

Emulated hardware should be parallel to the actual hardware regardless of system specifications, usually slowdowns that happen on the actual hardware should happen with the emulated hardware as well.

[Link_to_the_past]

It depends on user config, the way the program is coded and the user's pc power on how fast a game will run. Sounds a bit noobish question for an old forum member . Never mind you compare a piece of software against a piece of hardware in terms of computing power

Emulated hardware should be parallel to the actual hardware regardless of system specifications, usually slowdowns that happen on the actual hardware should happen with the emulated hardware as well.

Ah, but in order for something like that to happen you need increased accuracy and to sacrifice speed in general.

[ugoo]

It seems more like an issue with the game itself, because the 3 games that have been listed so far Zangeki, Harvest Moon and NSMB the next levels do not seem like good indicators of what the Wii can and can't do when compared to games like SMG2, MP3, TP, Red Steel 2 or even F-Zero GX (GCN game but still more demanding than a lot of current Wii games). All of those games run at full speed all the time on the Wii and they are some of the best looking games the system has and have a fair amount of stuff going on at any one time.

[skid]

you need increased accuracy

Yes, accurately emulated timing would emulate the slowdowns that the original hardware has. At this time, Dolphin's CPU timing is pretty accurate, as is the DSP to a degree, but the video timing is not even in the ball park. I made some in-roads with the synchronised FIFO stuff but that is not enough either.

[ector]

you need increased accuracy

Yes, accurately emulated timing would emulate the slowdowns that the original hardware has. At this time, Dolphin's CPU timing is pretty accurate, as is the DSP to a degree, but the video timing is not even in the ball park. I made some in-roads with the synchronised FIFO stuff but that is not enough either.

Actually since we're not emulating the data cache, which is quite puny on a real Wii, the emulated CPU may run faster than the real one would in code that's affected a lot by cache locality. On the other hand, the real Wii cpu sometimes can execute up to two instructions per cycle but we only count one when timing in Dolphin. All in all this mostly seems to balance out but the first effect seems greater, so depending on the game Dolphin will run it smoother than a real Wii if the PC can keep up.