GPU upgrade

06-18-2015, 11:36 AM #1

Got a R9 285 at the moment, been thinking about handing it down to a family member that needs it and buying a new one. With the announcement of the Fury/Fury X, would the memory speed of those cards benefit Dolphin much more than the gddr5 that's on the 980ti? Obviously we have to wait for official benchmarks for the new cards, but it wouldn't hurt to ask.

yl-smash · 06-18-2015, 01:43 PM #2

Dolphin relies heavily on the CPU, not the GPU like pc games. The GPU primarily lets you up the enhancements. The CPU is almost always the bottleneck. That being said, you're not going to really see performance gains from the GPU upgrade.

nex86 · (This post was last modified: 06-19-2015, 10:31 AM by nex86.)

A better graphics card than the one you currently have wouldn't give you any benefits in Dolphin at all.
Like yl-smash said, Dolphin is heavily CPU demanding, so any faster CPU will help getting more fps.

yl-smash · 06-19-2015, 02:53 PM #4

Although OP already has an i5 4690k @ 4.2 GHz so I don't think he should be encountering any slowdowns except maybe in the most demanding games sometimes anyways?

06-19-2015, 05:35 PM #5

Yeah, no slowdowns as far as a I can tell except when I crank up the internal resolution or use custom textures. Didn't hurt to ask though, just waiting on actual reviews now to decide between the two.

kirbypuff · (This post was last modified: 06-20-2015, 09:32 AM by kirbypuff.)

(06-19-2015, 05:35 PM)Knight Wrote: Yeah, no slowdowns as far as a I can tell except when I crank up the internal resolution or use custom textures.

The OpenGL backend in Dolphin is known to run slower on AMD GPUs. Switching to the Direct3D backend will improve performance at higher resolutions (especially with EFB to RAM).

Updating your GPU drivers to the latest *beta* version (or the official driver that's going to be released at the end of this month) will also improve the OpenGL performance and give you those much needed extensions for full OpenGL 4.5 support.

**NKF98** · 06-20-2015, 08:23 AM #7

actually, getting a better GPU would be good for you if you want to run in higher IRs or AS, though the one you have now should get you to reasonable levels so long as you use D3D.

06-20-2015, 12:52 PM #8

Been using the latest beta driver that AMD offers for Windows 10, much greater speedup in games than the 15.15 beta listed on their site. Dunno when I moved over to OpenGL unless I got forced on to it. Switched it back to D3D.

I was under the impression (at least a few years back) that EFB to RAM slowed things down. Is that no longer correct?

**JosJuice** · 06-20-2015, 05:59 PM #9

(06-20-2015, 12:52 PM)Knight Wrote: I was under the impression (at least a few years back) that EFB to RAM slowed things down. Is that no longer correct?

That's correct, though the option has been renamed. Unchecking "Store EFB Copies to Texture Only" is the same as EFB to RAM.

kirbypuff · (This post was last modified: 07-03-2015, 04:55 AM by kirbypuff.)

(06-20-2015, 12:52 PM)Knight Wrote: Been using the latest beta driver that AMD offers for Windows 10, much greater speedup.

The beta drivers on the official site (14.502.x) are indeed worse (performance similar to the first "Omega" driver, but with a bunch of fixes and extra profiles)

15.150.x (the Rx 300 / Fury driver) is a bit better, with some optimizations and full OpenGL 4.5 support.

The Win10 driver you're using now (15.200.x) is even more optimized. Very good performance and less issues than 15.150.x.