Hardware Advice

[AwesomeMarioFan]

Hello,

I got a computer recently for a good price, here are the specifications:

CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1270 v2 @ 3.5Ghz (Max Turbo 3.9Ghz)
RAM: 16GB DDR3
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GT 610

The CPU has a Passmark of 2075 for the single threaded benchmark and has a pretty good clock speed, so it seems to me that it should be able to run basically any game in Dolphin? From the games that I ran so far this seems to be the case, but wanted to verify. (If it helps, I ran the Dolphin 5.0 benchmark and got a time of around 7 minutes IIRC.)

Obviously the GPU is really lacking though - I am currently running all games at 1x resolution and it seems to be fine for the most part. The reason I am posting this though is that I am looking to upgrade my GPU soon to be able to run games at a higher resolution like 720p, but wasn't sure of a good card to get. I am looking for a good deal on one since graphics cards are expensive now, so I was wondering if anyone had a recommendation of one which would be good to put in this system.

[ExtremeDude2]

What is your price range?

[AwesomeMarioFan]

What is your price range?

I'd say anywhere from $100-$200, I'm only planning to use the card for Dolphin so wasn't looking for a really powerful one.
As a side note, with my current card I'm getting stuttering issues sometimes with Vsync enabled (if I turn it off it runs smooth but has bad screen tearing), I would assume this is because of my graphics card or is it something related to the driver/Dolphin?

[ExtremeDude2]

If you drop below 60 FPS, vsync can cause problems. As for the GPU, a GTX 1050 should be more than enough even for 1080p.

[mstreurman]

I'd say anywhere from $100-$200, I'm only planning to use the card for Dolphin so wasn't looking for a really powerful one.
As a side note, with my current card I'm getting stuttering issues sometimes with Vsync enabled (if I turn it off it runs smooth but has bad screen tearing), I would assume this is because of my graphics card or is it something related to the driver/Dolphin?

Screen tearing is a problem where your Vertical refresh rate of your screen and your GPU don't line up perfectly. This is WHY VSYNC was created in the first place. It is not a problem with either Software or Hardware really, it is an artifact of days gone which reared its ugly head since we have (digital) progressive scan screens. It did however exist in the analog era as well, but it was (IMO) not as visible.

In PC gaming we can easily use Double/Triple buffering or Adaptive v-sync tech's (AMD Freesync or nVidia G-sync, both need to be supported in the whole display chain) to alleviate the issue because all games have variable frame rates but emulation is dependent on frame rate thanks to the way the games were created since the total speed of the game is linked to the FPS with here and there a game that supports variable FPS.

So as I explained before, VSYNC syncs up the screen and GPU output and to achieve this the amount of FPS needs to be an amount that is some sort of fraction of the refresh rate of the screen so for a 60Hz screen that would be 30 and 60 thus what happens is: if your computer is unable to keep the full FPS (with usually a leeway of about 2-3 FPS) it will snap to the closest LOWER fraction. Which is of course "fatal" for emulation because it basically halves the speed the game is running at.

For 1080p/3xIR I advise at least a GeForce GTX750ti or other nVidia card that has at least a 5 at the second to last spot and a minimum of a 7 at the first (2) spot(s) (e.g. 750, 950,1050), If you want to use Shader Compilation: Asynchronous (Ubershaders) the requirements go up quite a bit and I'd say to have at least a 10 in the first 2 spots for 1080p/3x IR (and for older generation cards you can go up in the second to last spot to at least a 6 or 7 e.g. GTX770 or GTX960), for 4K/UHD/2160p/6xIR I would really recommend a recent higher end card to get the most out of Dolphin (e.g. GTX970 or GTX1060 and up) because of HDMI 2.0.

For AMD side I have no recommendations since I have no clue what they are doing nowadays, but check reviews to find cards that have similar performance (e.g. RX470 or RX580).