Good enough specs to run dolphin?

[ZRosen79]

Hi, im not sure if it is just that my specs are bad or my settings, but in TLoZ- Wind Waker, there are some major sound issues (Lots of cracking). Some slowed down fps and graphics, but overall graphics arent the problem. Runs around 20-25 fps. I've tried so many different combination in the settings, but didnt make a huge difference. The default dosent work. My current setting for audio are:
DSP LLE
Dolby Pro Logic II Decoder enabled
Audio Backend: OpenAL
Latency:30

My specs:
Windows 7 x64
HP p7-1234
AMD A6-3650 APU 4 cores 2.60 GHz
AMD Radeon HD Graphics
8GB of RAM

[AnyOldName3]

A) That CPU is rather slow, so may struggle with Dolphin

B) Abandon OpenAL for XAudio. You'll lose surround sound, but gain tolerable sound.

C) For any accurate audio backend, sound is likely to sound dodgy when you're not running at full speed. AX microcode HLE and all LLE has this. Zelda microcode HLE is buggy (although work is being done) but when it works, doesn't stutter below full speed.

D) OpenAL has time stretching to lessen this, but it requires latency and sounds bad. XAudio recently got its own workaround which is likely to sound better as long as you're pretty close to full speed.

[DJBarry004]

I second the first point AON3 mentioned. APUs are bad, pretty bad for Dolphin.

[kinkinkijkin]

No, but, if you follow this guide (there's no specific guide on this, iirc), you will be able to play something like wind waker:

Step 1: Use XAudio
Step 2: Abandon any pretense of using LLE. Find the game.ini file for wind waker (I believe it's GZLE01), and remove "usehle=false".
Step 3: While you're at it, disable the forcing of EFB to RAM.
Step 4: In the dolphin settings, set audio to HLE and set EFB to texture.

Now your game will run at nearly full speed. It'll look worse, sound worse, and even freeze sometimes, but it's playable now.

Heck, just to be thorough:

Step 5: All AMD CPUs since the introduction of Phenom II (probably earlier) can be overclocked in SOME manner, even if it's not the multiplier-based overclocking that people who've never overclocked an AMD processor think is the only kind of overclocking. So, slap some extra clocks on that baby. Only some, though.

I got my gimped Phenom II (no L3, smaller L2, two less cores, clock rate reduced) up ~1.0 GHz and went from around what you're getting right now to full speed all of the time in wind waker with those settings, so, if you shoot for ~700 MHz more, you should be good to go. Just remember not to want to play Twilight Princess and Mario Kart: Double Dash!!!. I swear, the two rips I gave care to save from the OS switch purge with wind waker after I lost almost all of my discs and they can't even run full-speed on my computer...

[AnyOldName3]

When people accidentally used EFB to texture in the original dolphin benchmark, it didn't seem to make a measurable difference to wind waker, so unless you're sure it gives a speedup on your machine, it's probably better to leave it set to RAM.

[kinkinkijkin]

The difference seems to be substantial on my machine. A whole frame or two. Must be my tiny caches, and complete lack of an L3.

[AnyOldName3]

This was on ~100+ FPS values which fluctuate throughout the benchmark, so if it was something below 5% then it is unlikely to have shown up. 5% (1/20 i.e. an extra single FPS more when you start at 20 FPS) isn't a huge speedup.

[ZRosen79]

Thanks,
Don't know why though, but xaudio2 isn't on the list. Only DSound, OpenAL and no audio backend.

[kinkinkijkin]

Have you installed the latest dxredist package? That will contain XAudio, which is a far newer, and far faster version of DSound, and is faster than OpenAL in Windows.

Also, try reducing OS overhead, if you haven't already. This entails ending unneeded background processes, making sure Dolphin is the only highly-stressing process running (no web browsers, either!), and increasing dolphin's priority a smidgen. Not too much, though, or input lag will start to kick in. And, boy, it really kicks in.

[DJBarry004]

No, but, if you follow this guide (there's no specific guide on this, iirc), you will be able to play something like wind waker:

Step 1: Use XAudio
Step 2: Abandon any pretense of using LLE. Find the game.ini file for wind waker (I believe it's GZLE01), and remove "usehle=false".
Step 3: While you're at it, disable the forcing of EFB to RAM.
Step 4: In the dolphin settings, set audio to HLE and set EFB to texture.

Now your game will run at nearly full speed. It'll look worse, sound worse, and even freeze sometimes, but it's playable now.

Heck, just to be thorough:

Step 5: All AMD CPUs since the introduction of Phenom II (probably earlier) can be overclocked in SOME manner, even if it's not the multiplier-based overclocking that people who've never overclocked an AMD processor think is the only kind of overclocking. So, slap some extra clocks on that baby. Only some, though.

I got my gimped Phenom II (no L3, smaller L2, two less cores, clock rate reduced) up ~1.0 GHz and went from around what you're getting right now to full speed all of the time in wind waker with those settings, so, if you shoot for ~700 MHz more, you should be good to go. Just remember not to want to play Twilight Princess and Mario Kart: Double Dash!!!. I swear, the two rips I gave care to save from the OS switch purge with wind waker after I lost almost all of my discs and they can't even run full-speed on my computer...

AMD APUs (not CPUs) can´t be OCed manually, they have their default Turbo frequency which they use automatically. Also, why not MK-DD? It can now have full BGM on HLE, so it won´t run that bad.